I am disabused of all faith, and see too clearly.

What I hate is the thought of being under a man's thumb," I had told Doctor Nolan. "A man doesn't have a worry in the world, while I've got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.

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 know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.

Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within.

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.