“I've always had this deep-down conviction that I'm not like everybody else, and there's an amazingly exciting new life waiting for me just around the corner.”

Innkeeper's wife
A Child is Born (1942)
Context: I'm waiting. … For something new and strange,
Something I've dreamt about in some deep sleep,
Truer than any waking,
Heard about, long ago, so long ago,
In sunshine and the summer grass of childhood,
When the sky seems so near.
I do not know its shape, its will, its purpose
And yet all day its will has been upon me,
More real than any voice I ever heard,
More real than yours or mine or our dead child's,
More real than all the voices there upstairs,
Brawling above their cups, more real than light.
And there is light in it and fire and peace,
Newness of heart and strangeness like a sword,
And all my body trembles under it,
And yet I do not know.

Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Variant: That everyone is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn't necessarily perverse.
Source: Infinite Jest (1996)

A new world to write about.
Source: Water Street (2006), Chapters 1-10, p. 17

2010s, 2014, Voice of the Americans (2014)

Source: Franny and Zooey (1961), Franny (1955), p. 30

Source: Trusting Soul

"Sometimes", § 7
Red Bird (2008)
Context: Death waits for me, I know it, around
one corner or another.
This doesn't amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me. After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listened to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.