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“The mere thought of having to enter into contact with someone else makes me nervous. A simple invitation to have dinner with a friend produces an anguish in me that’s hard to define. The idea of any social obligation whatsoever – attending a funeral, dealing with someone about an office matter, going to the station to wait for someone I know or don’t know – the very idea disturbs my thoughts for an entire day, and sometimes I even start worrying the night before, so that I sleep badly. When it takes place, the dreaded encounter is utterly insignificant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different: I never learn to learn.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“My first prayer was into a purple plastic toy megaphone. I even went into the closet to do it in case God was shy like me.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“Surely in this vale of tears we call life, the ill, the halt, and the lame find it curious that some people with constitutions like bull calves sometimes consider their good health and strength a curse rather than a blessing. It can be, though. In fistfights, even beaten senseless, we don't fall down nearly soon enough; the joys of drug abuse don't seem to take their proper toll; and, sometimes, when we try to drink ourselves to death, we fail miserably. Miserably.”
― James Crumley, Dancing Bear

“She was, [Wilfrid Riley] recalled, "a very clever person, but you couldn't be at ease with her some way. She wasn't with you. She was up in the clouds, always studying poetry, what have you . . . You couldn't sit with her and converse with her like you can normal people." It wasn't pride, he thought, that made her this way. "Shyness came into it. She couldn't lend herself to people. She was a little bit aloof from people, and I don't think she intended to be.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath