“I wanted my life to start - but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.”

"This Drastic Diet Change Helped Venus Williams Fight Her Autoimmune Condition", interview with Health (12 January 2017) http://www.health.com/nutrition/venus-williams-raw-vegan-diet.

Grouse on the Mountain (1994)

As quoted in Why Angus King is the most important Senate candidate in the country" by Aaron Blake in The Washington Post (6 March 2012) http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/why-angus-king-is-the-most-important-senate-candidate-in-the-country/2012/03/06/gIQANf7DvR_blog.html

Source: Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 281
Context: Is the truth depressing? Some may find it so. But I find it liberating, and consoling. When I believed that my existence was a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.

Source: "Unsafe at Any Speed or: Safe, Sane and Consensual, My Fanny", p. 14

"Journal Entries", p. 188
Memory and Dream (1994)
Context: I don't know why I care what people write about me after I'm dead, except that since I invest so much of my time telling the truth in my fiction, I'd hate to see someone play fast and loose with the pieces of my life. I don't care what they might think of me; but I don't want lies about my life used to invalidate the stories. My characters seem real because they are drawn from the realities of my life. I didn't have to research their pain; I just tapped into my own.

Nausea (1938)
Source: Nausea, The Wall and Other Stories