“I'm not a very nostalgic person. I don't really look at the past and summon up regrets, or self-congratulations, it just is not a mechanism that operates very strongly in me. So I neither have regrets nor occasions for self-congratulations.”

“I strongly believe that to heal from the adoption wound we all have to grieve our losses individually and then together. I don't regret finding my birth family, however hard it was. It has given me a sense of self that I didn't have before.”

“Self-injury is a sign of distress not madness. We should be congratulated on having found a way of surviving.”

“Allow me to congratulate you on your very astute powers of observation.”

“If you really want to know, I’d rather not have been born at all. I find life very tiring. The thing’s done now, of course, and I can’t alter it. But there will always be this regret at the back of my mind, I shall never quite be able to get rid of it, and it will spoil everything. The thing to do now is to grow old quickly, to eat up the years as fast as possible, looking neither right nor left.”

“If I had it to do all over again . . . I wouldn't change a thing.'. . . the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation.”