“The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.”

“Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.”

“You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed.”

“Many of the most accomplished girls are disconnecting from the truest parts of themselves, sacrificing essential self-knowledge to the pressure of who they think they ought to be.”

“to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.”

“Why were there no words that spoke positively about being concerned about the self? Why was there only negative connotation in terms like "selfish", "self-interested", "self-centred", "self-obsessed" and so on? Why was it so much better to be without a self: "selfless", "self-sacrificing", "self-effacing", etc?”