Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.

This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.

It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one.

I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.

He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.

This intimacy is not necessary; no one is compelling me to open my inmost self and lay it naked, undefended, against that of another – merely for the joy of the communion.

Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind's thousand small accesses to pleasure.