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

One thing, I try to be honest. And what is revealed is often rather hideously unflattering.

But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead -- after all, I had been "analyzed." Instead, all I could see were question marks.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.

Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart?