For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people’s faces.

Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know however slightly, and I am at once seized by a shivering violent enough to...

What is society but an individual? […] The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean...

Show me what you’ve written,” I said, although I wanted desperately to avoid looking at it.

All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other...

[…] I was afraid to board a streetcar because of the conductor; I was afraid to enter the Kabuki Theater for fear of the usherettes standing along the sides of the red-carpeted staircase at the...

And I was incapable of living all by myself in those lodgings where I didn’t know a soul. It terrified me to sit by myself quietly in my room. I felt frightened, as if I...

I felt this awful obligation to be charming or at least have something to say, and the pressure of having to be charming (or merely verbal) incapacitates me.

He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.