You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.

These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.

The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?

I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.

It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.

Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.

We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end.