Quotes from Flora Rheta Schreiber

You're never ready for what you have to do. You just do it. That makes you ready.

Isolated, she managed somehow to feel free—albeit with a freedom that made her want to smash a hole in the very center of the universe.

There is no past. Past is present when you carry it with you.

i have no point in procrastinating any longer..

I'm not fit to occupy space. Excuse me for living.

I want somebody to love, and I want somebody to love me. And nobody ever will. And that's why it hurts. Because it makes a difference. And when nobody cares, it makes you all mad inside and it makes you want to say things, tear up things, break things, get through the glass.

Theirs was the eternal youth of an alternating self, a youth with the constant although unfulfilled promise of growing up

I have to force myself even to move my eyeballs. It's so easy just to stare.

The neurologist had dismissed her case after a single visit, handing out an easy nostrum by telling her father that if she continued to write poetry, she would be all right.

She'd abandoned the animal she loved as she herself had been abandoned repeatedly in the past by people who had claimed to love her.

The anger. The terror. The feeling of entrapment. the profound distrust of people.The wistful, plaintive conviction that a window, a thing, was more important than she. These feelings and attitudes, expressed in the course of this hour, were symptoms of some profound disturbance.

It all made sense — terrible sense. The panic she had experienced in the warehouse district because of not knowing what had happened had been superseded at the newsstand by the even greater panic of partial knowledge. And now the torment of partly knowing had yielded to the infinitely greater terror of knowing precisely

I realized how trapped I was by all the talk of the end of the world.

God fearing and man hating. Sugar sugar. There was so much sugar in the way they pretended to treat each other that I suffered from diabetes of the soul.

Will there never be an end that also has a beginning? Will there never be continuity bridging the awful void between now and some other time, a time in the future, a time in the past?

It is so much more threatening to have something out of hand than to believe that at any moment I can stop (I started to say "This foolishness") any time I need to.

When I wrote the previous letter, I had made up my mind I would show you how I could be very composed and cool and not need to ask you to listen to me nor to explain anything to me nor need any help. By telling you that all this about the multiple personalities was not really true but just put on, I could show, or so I thought, that I did not need you. Well, it would have been easier if it were put on.

Self against self in a woman divided.

Willard married his father in female form.

Well, it would have been easier if it were put on. But the only ruse of which I'm guilty is to have pretended for so long before coming to you that nothing was wrong. Pretending that the personalities did not exist has now caused me to lose about two days.

You knock yourself down. You don't think much of yourself. That's an uncomfortable feeling. So you project it on others and say, 'They don't like me.