"My god! people say. You have so much self-control! And later: My god. You’re so, so sick. When people say this, they turn their heads, you’ve won your little game. You have proven your thesis that no-body-loves-me-every-body-hates-me, guess-I’ll-just-eat-worms. You get to sink back into your hospital bed, shrieking with righteous indignation. See? you get to say. I knew you’d give up on me. I knew you’d leave."

"You go insane about now. You understand, it just happens. Crazy isn’t always what they say it is. It’s not always the old woman wearing sneakers and a scarf wandering around with a shopping cart hollering at no one, nothing, tumbling through years in her head.
No. Sometimes it is a girl wearing boots and jeans and a sweater, arms crossed in front of her, shivering, wandering through the streets at night, all night, murmuring to no one, nothing, tumbling through the strange unreal dimensions in her head."

"Madness will push you anywhere it wants. It never tells you where you’re going, or why. It tells you it doesn’t matter. It persuades you. It dangles something sparkly before you, shimmering like that water patch on the road up ahead. You will drive until you find it, the treasure, the thing you most desire. You will never find it."

"You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel all right. You forget what it means to feel all right because you feel like shit all the time, and you can’t remember what it was like before. People take the feeling of full for granted. They take for granted the feeling of steadiness, of hands that do not shake, heads that do not ache. Stomachs that do not begin to wake up in the night, calves and thighs knotting in muscles that are beginning to eat away at themselves. They may or may not be awakened at night by their own inexplicable sobs."

"You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad."

"In truth, you like the pain. You like it because you believe you deserve it, and the fact that you’re putting yourself through pain means you are doing what you, by all rights, ought to do. You’re doing something right… Your ability to withstand pain is your claim to fame. It is ascetic, holy. It is self-control. It is masochism and masochism is pleasurable to many, but we don’t like to think about that. We don’t like to think that a person could have a twisted auto-erotic life going on, be both a top and a bottom, and experience both at once: the pleasure of beating the hell out of a body shackled at the wrists and the pleasure of being the body and knowing we deserve each blow."