Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.

It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.

They would grow old. They would forget me.

I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling.

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

It never occurred to me to say no.

As I lay on my back in bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it.