... because here I was having a life, even though it was a pastiche of elements of the life of someone else.

There's more to life than just surviving . . . but . . . sometimes just surviving is all you get

If you want to master your life, you have to learn to organize your feelings. By becoming aware of them, you can trace them back to the thought process that prompted them, and from there you can decide whether or not the idea is an actual threat or concern, or a fabrication of your reptilian mind just trying to keep you alive.

It’s not the events that shape my life that determine how I feel and act, but, rather, it’s the way I interpret and evaluate my life experiences.

Life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish tother from which.

It seemed sometimes that life was nothing more than the accumulation of emotional baggage-memories,regrets and lost opportunities.

She considered [her] life, which had not been a life but only a sort of greeting, a Hello There.

So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.

I learned how to live in my head, where I could ignore the world that refused to accept me,

It’s not the events that shape my life that determine how I feel and act, but, rather, it’s the way I interpret and evaluate my life experiences

Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.

She taught me that life goes on, and that I had a choice. To lament what I no longer had or be grateful for what remained.

I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

Oddly enough, living only for one’s emotions, like a flag obedient to the breeze, demands a way of life that makes one balk at the natural course of events, for this implies being altogether subservient to nature. The life of the emotions detests all constraints, whatever their origin, and thus, ironically enough, is apt eventually to fetter its own instinctive sense of freedom.