"I feel without feeling, which is nothing, which is easy."

"I should say something about loneliness. The panic, the sweeping hysteria that comes not when you are without others, but when you are without yourself, adrift."

"I want to prepare her for the curse of perseverance. She may not know about resiliency. That she will last."

"To penetrate you had to become."

"'That's the whole fucking problem,' Jack would say. 'I don't want to live forever. I'm having trouble with the idea of Tuesday.'"

"It confused me to be initiated into his aloneness; it confused me to know such a place existed...such a site of self-love and self-abuse."

"True kindness is stabilizing."

"You are taken into life's severest confidence. You are undeceived."

"In my body I felt night...I felt suffused with life, true life, which was the aliveness of me and the aliveness of beyond me."

"If, after all that thinking, you decide not to run, that decision would be impure. It would have come from fear- fear of judgment or failure. And if, after thinking, you decide to run, that choice would also be impure, coming from a wish to defy convention or to take a personal risk. So, you could say that the first feeling, the truest feeling, the physical, feral urge, is contaminated by secondary things, things coming from thought."

"I was so convinced of the meaninglessness of the will in relation to the night that I wasn't even planning on participating very actively."

"'To Jack,' I said. 'My very special regret.''

"Never guessing...I might grow dangerously weary of sufficiency."

"Sometimes you search inside for a feeling, and, finding none, you remember that no feeling is frequently the most possible feeling."

"I remember thinking that I was about to be badly used by circumstance."

"When you swim at midnight, you waive everything, learning that there is no fear worse than the rigor of your delusions."

"I am tired. It is exhausting to give up the past, as I have done...it is exactly like mono, like an auto-immune disease, a disease against the self."

"One must confront one's innocence with caution when it has gotten you nowhere, when it has proved itself fallible, when no more remains, when you discover that you have outspent the purity of your heart."

"Jack did not stumble unconsciously into adversity. Jack chose adversity because he considered himself to be a casualty of prosperity."

"I did not intend...to live anymore of my life by delirium or absentia."

from Anthropology of an American Girl by H. T. Hamann