“I would like to be soft and warm. I would be terrified to be that way. I could be hurt if I were soft and warm. I could be hurt by something other than myself. It is harder to be soft than it is to be hard. I could be hurt by something other than myself.”

“No woman could ever hurt me, because I don't permit myself to wish for something from people. So they can't disappoint me.”

“I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.”

“I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.”

“She cannot chain my soul. Yes, she could hurt me. She'd already done so… I would bleed, or not. Scar, or not. Live, or not. But she could not hurt my soul, not unless I gave it to her.”

“What is going to happen in the course of my day that will be an improvement over lying on something very soft, underneath something very warm, wearing only underwear, doing absolutely nothing, all by myself?”

“I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition.”

“I wonder if it hurts to live,
And if they have to try,
And whether, could they choose between,
They would not rather die.”

“I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.”

“I had never believed I had a soul until then, when it laid bare a hurt more deep than any part of me could bear.”