“The more you die to self on daily basis, the more you enjoy life.”
“Life demands that we live to care for others instead of living to care for self”
“This above all: to thine own self be true.”
“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
“The better you feel about yourself, the less you feel the need to show off.”
“If someone does not want me it is not the end of the world. But if I do not want me, the world is nothing but endings.”
“In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.”
“Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.”
“Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.”
“There s something liberating about not pretending. Dare to embarrass yourself. Risk.”
“If I was made of cake I d eat myself before somebody else could.”
“It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.”
“One must find the source within one s own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking -- a detour, an error.”
“You re a poem? I repeated. She chewed her lower lip. If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose whose world was swallowed by the sea. Isn t it hard to be three things at the same time? What s your name? Enn. So you are Enn, she said. And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?”
“I myself am an absolute abyss.”
“Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.”