The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.

One night she hid the pink cotton scarf from her raincoat in the pillowcase when the nurse came around to lock up her drawers and closets for the night. In the dark she had made a loop and tried to pull it tight around her throat. But always just as the air stopped coming and she felt the rushing grow louder in her ears, her hands would slacken and let go, and she would lie there panting for breath, cursing the dumb instinct in her body that fought to go on living

The claw of the magnolia, drunk on its own scents, asks nothing of life.

The day I went into physics class it was death.

Love life day by day, color by color, touch by touch.

I am afraid of getting older … I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free…. I want, I want to think, to be omniscient…. I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.