“I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.”

“But when they were done, I wondered if there would be a next time. I felt good. I wasn’t dead, yet something was dead. Perhaps I’d managed my peculiar objective of partial suicide. I was lighter, airier than I’d been in years.”

“Was I ever crazy? Maybe. Or maybe life is… Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever. They were not perfect, but they were my friends.”

“I was trying to explain my situation to myself. My situation was that I was in pain and nobody knew it, even I had trouble knowing it. So I told myself, over and over, You are in pain. It was the only way I could get through to myself. I was demonstrating externally and irrefutably an inward condition.”

“Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.”

“The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think manypeople kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't.Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark--why not killmyself? Missed the bus--better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie--maybeI shouldn't kill myself.”

“My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.”