“I had no business inviting other people’s emotions into my life when I had no idea what to do with my own.”

“i had no idea what i wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.”

“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s. ”

“I had been brought up to be something of an intellectual, but there seemed at the time no connection between my newly formed ideas and the world to which I had returned. Indeed, I did not even recognize my ideas as ideas at all: they seemed to be culled from somewhere else and did not belong to me. I did not know then what I am just beginning to know now: that my ideas were indeed mine, that I had reacted and changed and moved, that I had already analyzed and synthesized, rejecting some thoughts, adopting others, putting yet others away for a while to be thought on. I did not recognize how mentally active an individual I had become, already divorced from the world through my own thoughts, my own perceptions of right and wrong, of honour and justice, of what mattered and what did not. (2007: 117)”

“I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God's business.”

“I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live - if what others are doing is called living - but to express myself.”