I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

In a rabbit-fear I may hurl myself under the wheels of the car because the lights terrify me, and under the dark blind death of wheels I will be safe. I am very tired, very banal, very confused. I do not know who I am tonight. I wanted to walk until I dropped and not complete the inevitable circle of coming home.

You are the one. Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.

... stop trying to get me to write about 'decent courageous people' -- read the Ladies' Home Journal for those! ... I believe in going through and facing the worst, not hiding from it.

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