My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

...it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.

That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.
"Save them for my funeral," I'd said.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.

Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.