“There's nothing hard about it. But I get praised for the hardest of things I do, and I do some of the hardest of things. Things like waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night, all alone except for when I'm with someone; and it's getting harder and harder.”

“Am I just chasing it because it's the hardest thing for me to get and I want to prove I can do it?”

“Getting people to welcome feedback was the hardest thing I ever had to do as an educator.”

“I'm sorry you don't get it, Mom. Sometimes I don't get why I do the things I do. I just know I wake up every morning and wish I was dead.”

“It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be hard as hard can be grows harder yet.”

“What would I like to get away from? Complexity. Anxiety. A feeling I've had my whole life that at any given time there's something I'm forgetting, some detail or chore, something that I'm supposed to be doing or should have already done. That nagging sensation - I get up with it, I go through the day with it, I go to sleep with it. When I was a kid, I had a habit of coming home from school on Friday afternoons and immediately doing my homework. So I'd wake up on Saturday morning with this wonderful sensation, a clean, open feeling of relief and possibility and calm. There'd be nothing I had to do. Those Saturday mornings, they were a taste of real freedom that I've hardly ever experienced as an adult. I never wake up in Elmsford with the feeling that I've done my homework.”