"I’m scared I’m going to spend the rest of my life in a state of yearning, regardless of where I am."

"I’m not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it."

"It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any."

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."

"My alone feels so good, I’ll only have you if you’re sweeter than my solitude."

"For myself, I have no aim. I have no ambition. I will let myself be carried on by the general impulse. The surface of my mind slips along like a pale-grey stream reflecting what passes. I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me, here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends. The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the features from faces. People might walk through me. And, what is this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar – forest trees or the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel; our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence."

"Why must they grow up and lose it all?"

"I wish you’d find the exit out of my head."

"You can’t find intimacy—you can’t find home—when you’re always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood."

"If you care about what others think of you, then you will always be their slave."

"I get worried for young girls sometimes; I want them to feel that they can be sassy and full and weird and geeky and smart and independent, and not so withered and shriveled."

"Be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here."

"Remember how far you’ve come, not just how far you have to go. You are not where you want to be, but neither are you where you used to be."