With no blame there's no shame. A human society can't exist without shame. Shame is like handedness or walking upright. It's a central human attribute. In fact, it's the first human quality ever recorded.''Where?''Genesis, Chapter Three. The covering of nakedness. The acquisition of shame was the first consequence of consciousness, of the speciating moment. Take shame from me and you are calling me pre-human.

That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach - I'm not sure I'd grasped that exactly, but I'd got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards.

I want to be careful not to throw all this away. This is happiness. I think this is what happiness is. I haven't got it yet, but I can sense it out there. I feel I'm close to it. Some days, I'm so close I can almost smell it.

I'm too much of a coward to kill myself. And too much of a coward to live

Mama, I know you used to ride the bus. Riding the bus and it__ hot and bumpy and crowded and too noisy and more than anything in the world you want to get off and the only reason in the world you don__ get off is it__ still fifty blocks from where you__e going? Well, I can get off right now if I want to, because even if I ride fifty more years and get off then, it__ the same place when I step down to it. Whenever I feel like it, I can get off. As soon as I__e had enough, it__ my stop. I__e had enough.

I realize how depraved it was to instill false guilt in an innocent child's conscience, causing a distorted image of life, God, & self, leaving little if any feeling of personal worth.