It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.

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

Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.

One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people.

Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

I think I have fallen in love and I believe the woman in question, though she has not said so, returns my feelings. How can I be sure when she has said nothing? Is this youthful vanity? I wish in some ways that it were. But I am so convinced that I barely need question myself. This conviction brings me no joy.[…]I am driven by a greater force than I can resist. I believe that force has its own reason and its own morality even if they may never be clear to me while I am alive.

From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else’s. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on her ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else’s, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.