Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.

I must learn more about these people―try to understand them, put myself in their place. No, instead I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is.

But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?

I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.

I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.

You are a dream; I hope I never meet you.

Character is fate.

I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.

I knew you'd decide to be all right again.

The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.

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

At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.

Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled “enemy?

Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.

It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.

Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.

I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.

I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am.

Is it the sea you hear in me? Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it.

It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it.

I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling.

I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.

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.