There is something rotten inside of me. I find it near impossible to drown out the constant cacophony of voices whispering in my ear, telling me I am evil. I'm drowning, doctor! And I can't stop asking myself, why do I hate myself so much?

I am supposed to be touched. I can't wait to find the person who will come into the kitchen just to smell my neck and get behind me and hug me and breathe me in and make me turn around and make me kiss his face and put my hands in his hair even with my soapy dishwater drips. I am a lovely woman. Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?

I’m lonely. And I’m lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic.

Yes, Mr Gray, the gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats.

What is right from wrong? What is good from evil? Nobody can truly distinguish between them. Even if there was a god. Now, supposing a god and his world existed, even then I’d stop and think for myself. I’d decide for myself whether his teachings are right or wrong. After all, I am just the same as you. I put faith in my own convictions as to what I believe is right, and consider them to be righteous.

Finally, in a low whisper, he said "I think I might be a terrible person." For a split second I believed him- I thought he was about to confess a crime, maybe a murder. Then I realised that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before asking someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.

It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realise just how much you love them.

In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It's important to combine the two in just the right amount.

Here. It says to 'like yourself.' But good things about yourself, how are you supposed to find them? I only know things I hate about myself. 'Cause that's all I know, I hate myself. But even if you force yourself to find good things, it feels so empty. It doesn't work that way. People like your teacher just don't get it. I think when you hear someone say they like you, for the first time, then you can begin to like yourself. I think when someone accepts you, for the first time you feel like you can forgive yourself a little. You can begin to face your fears with courage.

We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should, that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything- what a waste!

That’s right, death. You said I am not like ordinary people. If there was just one thing I’d say that was true about, it is—I’m not afraid of death. People are funny because, of course, they don’t know anything about death.They never experienced it and knew it was something to fear, but they fear it instinctively. There’ve been countless times in my life when I thought I’d be better off dead. That nothing could be worse than what was happening to me right then. At times like that, death looks sweet and peaceful, and unbearably enticing.

Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.

Tsundoku, the act of buying books and letting them pile up unread.