True to oneself! Which self? Which of my manyhundreds of selves? Therearemomentswhen I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor, who has all hisworkcutoutto enter the names and hand the keys to the wilful guests.
How soon country people forget.When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.
Anger and tenderness: my selves. And now I can believe they breathe in me as angels, not polarities.
The function of literature through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and thehigh authorityof theself in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting.
Not onlyareselves conditional buttheydie.Eachday, we wake slightlyaltered, and the person we were yesterday is dead.
Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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