What a mystery a marriage was. What a strange and violent world, the world of matrimony. I was glad to be outside it. The idea of it filled me with a sort of queasy pity.

I don't think I can marry, I'm not fit for it, I'm not real enough. That's the trouble. I'm a puppet that's realised what's wrong with itself and it's horrible. I'm propped up somewhere all alone, watching the real people go past. I'm propped up crying in a corner.

I had the illusion of conversing with a fellow being without a barrier, without a steel door, without a black hood over my head . . . I have never, I think, impressed upon you how almost impossible I find it to communicate with anybody.

I felt so ashamed with them because everything in their life was going so well and they were so sort of successful. I couldn't talk about what I wanted with them and they were always in a hurry.

Willy seemed like an inhabitant of some other dimension who could only tenuously communicate with the ordinary world. This would have troubled her less if she had not imagined his other dimension as a place of horror.

He felt himself falling into a state, very common when he was younger, of being totally cut off from the society he was in.

I felt such a stranger there, like a poor lodger. One must be with one's own people.

I'm not like other people, my life just doesn't work, it never has.