The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.

Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.

I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility - as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria.

The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.

I felt myself no longer a husk but a body with some of the body's sweet juices stirring again. I had my first dream in many months, confused but to this day imperishable, with a flute in it somewhere, and a wild goose, and a dancing girl.