I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.

Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?

Don't you kids get any ideas about dragging a trailer into the backyard. after you graduate from high school, i don't want to see you again.

Four years after my father's death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me.

Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.

She has given me a way out.

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief.

How Horrid" has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror--puberty, public disgrace--then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing.

It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.

Mom, how come you never go outside?""I told you, I'm a vampire.

Your unconscious wants to express the pain you feel about your own lost innocence. But your ego wants to keep it repressed. To the compromise is anxiety.

If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.

It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.

Gatsby's self-willed metamorphosis from farm boy to prince is many ways identical to my father's. Like Gatsby, my father fueled this transformation with the "colossal vitality of his illusion". Unlike Gatsby he did this on a school teacher's salary.

It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!

Psychoanalytic insight, Miller seems to suggest, is itself a pathological symptom.