There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.

There was a beautiful time.

Let's face it: I'm scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess, I'm afraid for myself...the old primitive urge for survival. It's getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

If you pluck out my heart To find what makes it move, You’ll halt the clock That syncopates our love.

I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.