I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me.

I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence.

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

I didn't really see why people should look at me. Plenty of people looked queerer than I did.

I hadn't, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord.

I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer to NOT feel, NOT to let the world touch one.

Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.