“Messy love is better than none, I guess. I am no authority on sane living.”

“Not a hope. I know where I am, and who, and what day it is. These are the tests, and I am sane. Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.”

“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”

“I should have known better than to rely on pills. You can't buy unconsciousness quite so cheaply.”

“Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.”

“The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies drive them on?”

“I am not a saint or a cripple,I am not a wound; now I will seewhether I am a coward.”