He’d also observed that part of this success was the product of being alone. ‘I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.’

She could tell the kind of person she was from the way people spoke to her.

It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.

‘Because, Nora, sometimes the only way to learn is to live.’ ‘Sounds hard.’

We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.

I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. Sylvia Plath

she had reached some state of acceptance about life – that if there was a bad experience, there wouldn’t only be bad experiences.

Maybe even suicide would have been too active. Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don’t even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.

She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery. That, she supposed, was the basis of depression as well as the difference between fear and despair. Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close