Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

The reason I haven't been writing in this book for so long is partly that I haven't had one decent coherent thought to put down.

The moon, too, abases her subjects, but in the daytime she is ridiculous. Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity, white and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide. No day is safe from news of you, walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.

It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it.

I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.