If I could have any job in the world I'd be a professional Cinderella.

I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.

Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?

Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?

My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.

It's important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there's a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there's a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there's a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance.

An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.