To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.

-Atwood, Margaret Eleanor
  Two-headed Poems,'Marrying the Hangman'.

The selfcannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted. 62

-Barthelme, Donald
  Sadness,'Daumier'.

Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, A chorus-ending from Euripides,ö And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears As old and new at once as Nature's self, To rap and knock and enter in our soul. Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, Round the ancient idol, on his base again,ö The grand Perhaps.

-Browning, Robert
  Men and Women,'Bishop Blougram's  Apology'.

None are so desolate but something dear, Dearer than self, possesses or possessed A thought, and claims the homage of a tear.

-Rochdale
^18  Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 2, stanza 24.

She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.

-Chopin, Kate (Katherine) ne¤  e  O'Flaherty
  The Awakening, ch.19.

Whenyou meet someone better thanyourself, turnyour thoughts to becoming his equal.When you meet someone not as good as you are, look within and examine your own self.

-Confucius or K'ung Fu-tse,'The MasterK'ung'
c.479  BC  The Analects.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

-Connolly, Cyril Vernon
  In the New Statesman, 25 Feb.

We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self.

-Connolly, Cyril Vernon
  The Unquiet Grave, pt.2.

To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

-DeLillo, Don
  Owen Brademas. The Names, ch.5.

  It isanuneasy lot at best, tobe what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at thisgreat spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self.

-Eliot, George pseudonym of  MaryAnn Evans
^2  Middlemarch, bk.3, ch.29.

One's complete sentences are attempts, as often as not, to complete an incomplete self with words.

-Gass,William H(oward)
  Interview in Paris Review, Summer.

All by my own-alone self.

-Harris,Joel Chandler
  Nights with Uncle Remus,'Brother  Wolf Falls a Victim'.

   So did I weave my self into the sense.

-Herbert, George
'Jordan (2)', collected in The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (published posthumously,1633).

The self isnow the sacred cow of American culture, self- esteem is sacrosanct, and so we labour to turn arts education into a system in which no one can fail. In the same spirit, tennis could be shorn of its elitist overtones: you just get rid of the net.

-Hughes, Robert Studley Forrest
  Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of  America.

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

-Huxley, Aldous Leonard
  Time Must Have a Stop.

Ich habe also demnach keine Erkenntnis von mir, wie ich bin, sondern bloÞ, wie ich mir selbst erscheine. Das Bewusstsein seiner selbst ist also noch lange nicht eine Erkenntnis seiner selbst. I have no knowledge of myself as I am but merely as I appear to myself. The consciousness of myself is thus very far from being a knowledge of the self.

-Kant, Immanuel
Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason), B158 (translated by N Kemp Smith).

The love of our neighbour is the only door out of the dungeon of self, where we mope and mow, striking sparks, and rubbing phosphorescence out of the walls, and blowing our own breath in our own nostrils, instead of issuing to the fair sunlight of God, the sweet winds of the universe.

-MacDonald, George
  Unspoken Sermons.

Is it not possible that the rage for confession, autobiography, especially for memories of earliest childhood, is explained by our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent; which, untouched by all we acquire and all we shed, pushes a green spear through the dead leaves and throughthemould, thrusts a scaled bud through years of darkness until, one day, the light discovers it and shakes the flower free andöwe are aliveöwe are flowering for our moment upon the earth? This is the moment which after all, we live foröthe moment of direct feeling when we are most ourselves and least personal.

-Beauchamp
   Journal entry,  Apr.

Virtue could see to do what Virtue would By her own radiant light, though sun and moon Were in the flat sea sunk. And Wisdom's self Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, Where with her best nurse contemplation She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings That in the various bustle of resort Were all too ruffl'd, and sometimes impair'd. He that has light within his own clear breast May sit i'the centre, and enjoy bright day, But he that hides a dark soul, and foul thoughts Benighted walks under the midday sun; Himself is his own dungeon.

-Milton,John
  Comus,  A Mask, l.372^83.

Le moi est ha|«s sable. The self is hateful. '

-Pascal, Blaise
c.1654^1662  Pense¤  es, no.455 (translated byA Krailsheimer).