feelings

Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.

“I thought of crawling in between the bed sheets and trying to sleep, but that appealed to me about as much as stuffing a dirty, scrawled-over letter into a fresh, clean envelope.”

[…] because wherever I sat – on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok – I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel…

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.

I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.