Status Updates From Alice James: A Biography

“She used other people’s voices to express her own thoughts. In this way she remained safe, risking no ideas or phrases of her own, yet engaging in the world of ideas to express something about her own mind. Her preoccupations with love, intimacy, death, happiness, pain, women, endurance, and transcendence come through clearly, if indirectly."

when, month after month, and year after year, I used to get my ‘attacks,’ and Mother and Father would watch by me through the long nights, I used to cry out to them to know what would become of me when I lost them.

Next, she described trying to study at school — as a change from shirking or wriggling with “impossible sensations of upheaval”; instead of being able to focus her mind on study, however, she watched it go altogether out of her control.

At the age of fourteen, she had concluded that life for her meant renunciation, a sort of spiritual suicide: 'Owing to muscular circumstances my youth was not of the most ardent, but I had to peg away pretty hard between 12 and 24, ‘killing myself,’ as some one calls it — absorbing into the bone that the better part is to clothe oneself in neutral tints, walk by still waters, and possess one’s soul in silence.'

those strange people who have the courage to be unhappy! Are they unhappy, by-the-way? Her ignorance was unfeigned. For all his avowals of altruism, her father steadfastly refused to acknowledge the reality of his children’s pain.