“The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.”

“Not easy to state the change you made.If I'm alive now, I was dead,Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.”

“So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.”

“I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:It is what you fear.I do not fear it: I have been there.--from "Elm", written 19 April 1962”

“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.”

“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.”

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