"The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness."

"I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my a…"

"There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with t…"

"People talk of “social outcasts.” The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, bu…"

"Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer "Nothing." The thought went through my mind that it…"

"Though I have always made it my practice to be pleasant to everybody, I have not once actually experienced friendship…"

"I was frightened even by God. I could not believe in his love, only his punishment. Faith. That, I felt, was the act …"

"What, I wondered, did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings? Where was the substance of this thing called …"

"Society. I felt as though even I were beginning at last to acquire some vague notion of what it meant. It is a strugg…"

"He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost."