“I spend a lot of time talking to people who disagree with me - I would go so far as to say that it's my favourite leisure activity,”

“Charientism (n.) A rhetorical term to describe saying a disagreeable thing in an agreeable way. If I knew how to say disagreeable things in an agreeable fashion I most likely would not be spending most of my time siting alone in a room, reading the dictionary.”

“I want to spend my time with people who don't look to be respected. But such good people won't want to spend their time with me.”

“It's not that I feel alone because I have no friends because I have lots of friends. I know that I have people who can hold me and reassure me and talk to ne and care for me and think of me but they can't be inside my head with me all the time - for all time.”

“Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.”

“I often feel like nobody," Skip says. "I ask myself: Why would you want to talk to me? Why would anyone want to talk to me? It comes on me suddenly, this feeling that I'm not anything...a person who has spent a lot of time in bed, who doesn't want to be anything."I know what he is talking about, and this time, I tell him that. For years, I could not understand why anyone took me seriously. I could not understand how I managed to get into MIT or Harvard, why anyone would offer me a postdoctoral fellowship or a job. I could not understand why people kept turning to me after September 11. I didn't see myself as a person who couldn't get out of bed, but as a salesgirl in a coffee shop - the job I had as a teenager who was afraid to apply to college. My identity was stuck there for year."Inside me there is the person who wants to be dead," he says. "I can't advocate for myself. I can advocate very strongly for others, but not for myself...Sometimes I'm not sure that I exist. Is this really me - this person whom people want to consult about clergy sexual abuse? Or am I really the person who can't get out of bed? I've gotten better - I spend more of my time living in the present. But it takes a lot of effort to stay in the present - a lot of yoga and meditation.”