“I often feel like I want to think something but I can't find the language that coincides with the thoughts, so it remains felt, not thought. Sometimes I feel like I'm thinking in Swedish without knowing Swedish.”

“Dr. Adler had instructed me to always say whatever I was thinking, but this was difficult for me, for the act of thinking and the act of articulating those thoughts were not synchronous to me, or even necessarily consecutive. I knew that I thought and spoke in the same language and that theoretically there should be no reason why I could not express my thoughts as they occurred or soon thereafter, but the language in which I thought and the language in which I spoke, though both English, often seemed divided by a gap that could not be simultaneously, or even retrospectively, bridged.”

“Most people think things are not real unless they are spoken, that it's the uttering of something, not the thinking of it, that legitimizes it. I suppose this is why people always want other people to say "I love you." I think just the opposite—that thoughts are realest when thought, that expressing them distorts or dilutes them.”

“I don't know why I felt so closed and bitter and threatened by the things I did not like.”

“Interacting with other people does not come naturally to me; it is a strain and requires effort, and since it does not come naturally I feel like I am not really myself when I make that effort. I feel fairly comfortable with my family, but even with them I sometimes feel the strain of not being alone.”

“I don't think I could ever work in such a blatantly hierarchical corporate setting. I know that everyone in this world is not equal, but I can't bear environments that make this truth so obvious.”

“I only feel like myself when I am alone.”