Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.
—Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
My money’s on Marmee
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (Excerpt)
by T. S. Eliot
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne in Paris
Truth
A pretty sight, a lady with a book.
—Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Not Waving But Drowning
by Stevie Smith
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
That Book Broad 