Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way–and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity.

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

They would grow old. They would forget me.

Intoxicated with madness, I'm in love with my sadness

I must say that I am not very genteel and I feel that gentility has a stranglehold: the neatness, the wonderful tidiness, which is so evident everywhere in England is perhaps more dangerous than it would appear on the surface.

They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.