“Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.”

“maybe we try too hard to be remembered, waking to the glowing yellow disc in ignorance, swearing that today will be the day, today we will makesomething of our lives. what if we are so busy searching for worth that we miss the sapphire sky and cackling blackbird. what else is missing?maybe our steps are too straight and our paths too narrow and not overlapping. maybe when they overlap someone in another country lights a candle, a coupleresolves their argument, a young man puts down his silver gun and walks away.”

“Nobody has a perfect life and it's entirely possible that if you want someone else's life they are busy wanting someone else's too–maybe even yours.”

“It will never be true. Things have never been okay with us. Maybe if I'd paid attention, I would have seen that on our first few dates. Maybe I would have noticed his possessiveness; maybe I would have seen the way he wrapped around me, made me his entire world, his obsession. Maybe I would have felt the wight he placed on my shoulders, one tiny stone at a time.”

“Maybe we feel meaning only when we deal with something bigger. Perhaps we hope that someone else, especially someone important to us, will ascribe value to what we've produced? Maybe we need the illusion that our work might one day matter to many people. That it might be of some value in the big, broad world out there [...]? Most likely it is all of these. But fundamentally, I think that almost any aspect of meaning [...] can be sufficient to drive our behaviour. As long as we are doing something that is somewhat connected to our self image, it can fuel our motivation and get us to work much harder.”

“To be ourselves we must have ourselves – possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.”