selves

Anger and tenderness: my selves. And now I can believe they breathe in me as angels, not polarities.

—Rich, Adrienne Cecile

True to oneself! Which self? Which of my many†hundreds 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.

—Beauchamp

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.

—Updike,John Hoyer

Not onlyareselves conditional buttheydie.Eachday, we wake slightlyaltered, and the person we were yesterday is dead.

—Updike,John Hoyer

   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.

—Morrison,Toni Chloe Anthony ne¤  e Wofford

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.

—Trillin, Calvin Marshall