The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrific, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mini.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

Do we always grind through the present, doomed to throw a gold haze of fond retrospect over the past?

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

To look at her, you might not guess that inside she is laughing and crying, at her own stupidities and luckiness, and at the strange enigmatic ways of the world which she will spend lifetime trying to learn and understand.

I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living.