“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”

“A small, answering point in my own body flew towards it. I felt my lungs inflate with the inrush of scenery -- air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”

“The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.”

“All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air. ”

“I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. A spark flew off Arnold and shook me, like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy.”

“What do you have in mind after you graduate?"What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue."I don't really know," I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.”

“I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.”