Hangsaman

The wet raincoat smell was exciting, carrying with it remotely the institutional smells of the college, a faint echo of a cologne Natalie had never worn in her life; near the pocket was a cigarette burn she had not made; the raincoat was in itself a symbol of going and coming, of wishing and fearing, or, precisely, the going out of a warm, firelit house into the heartbreaking cold

? Why, above all, the constant unusual shock of the sound of her own name said aloud?

A great envious excitement filled Natalie; she promised herself quickly that she would somehow, later, examine how it would feel to sit in class with such special secret knowledge, with such delicious sense of possession

wonder what I would say to a psychoanalyst. I wonder where people find words for all the funny things inside their heads. I keep turning around in circles and finding how well things fit together, but nothing is ever complete. I think if I could tell someone everything, every single thing, inside my head, then I would be gone, and not existing any more, and I would sink away into that lovely nothing-space where you don’t have to worry any more and no one ever hears you or cares and you can say anything but of course you wouldn’t be any more at all and you couldn’t really do anything so it wouldn’t matter what you did

Further irony would not materially improve this situation,

I used to think, when I was a child, that it was an awful thing to have to go on breathing and breathing, all my life until I was dead, all those thousands of years. And then I used to think that now I was conscious of breathing it would be like everything else where I did it without thinking for a while and then became aware of it, and it would be awkward and difficult to do it as well consciously, and then by the time I had thought that I used to realize that while I was thinking it I had been breathing.