You're so young... Are you sure that's what you want your life to be, forever and ever? That job? That career? That girlfriend?

I felt this awful obligation to be charming or at least have something to say, and the pressure of having to be charming (or merely verbal) incapacitates me.

It made me very sad, that question. Sad and defeated. Because I knew she knew why I was thinking about that woman-I was thinking about my own tendencies toward aloneness and I thought I could end up like that woman, with a bird perhaps, or a dog-probably a dog, I know birds are supposed to make good pets but I think there's something creepy about them-but alone with a life that didn't touch or overlap with anyone else's, a sort of hermetically sealed life.

I suppose most people would think that it was wonderful, that the world is so varied, that there is something for everyone, and I don't know why I felt so closed and bitter and threatened by things I did not like.

You're so young... Are you sure that's what you want your life to be, forever and ever? That job? That career? That girlfriend?

I always looked forward to being an adult, because I thought the adult world was, well—adult. That adults weren’t cliquey or nasty, that the whole notion of being cool, or in, or popular would case to be the arbiter of all things social, but I was beginning to realize that the adult world was as nonsensically brutal and socially perilous as the kingdom of childhood.

Unfortunately I have never been good in math. Numbers simply do not interest me or seem as real to me as words.