It's a fairly accurate portrait of me at eighteen, minus a few quirks like reckless driving and eating binges. It's accurate but it isn't profound.

I needed to be alone, I felt. I wanted to be going on alone to my future.

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

Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.

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

A thought is a hard thing to control.

By the time we hit the streets they were silent and closed in on us, and they had assumed the Nonchalant Look, an expression that said, I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor. But they were, and we were their six lunatics, so we behaved like lunatics.