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

I can't deceive myself out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.

I must not be selfless: develop a sense of self. A solidness that can't be attacked.

Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.

How many different deaths I can die?

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.

I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over - dead white, of course, with no makeup and from the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was.