“World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.”

“It was me, only me. Self-contained, self-reliant, and always, unquestionably self-assured.”

“Noone has yet succeeded in inventing a philosophy at once credible and self-consistent. Locke aimed at credibility, and achieved it at the expense of consistency. Most of the great philosophers have done the opposite. A philosophy which is not self-consistent cannot be wholly true, but a philosophy which is self-consistent can very well be wholly false. The most fruitful philosophies have contained glaring inconsistencies, but for that very reason have been partially true. There is no reason to suppose that a self-consistent system contains more truth than one which, like Locke’s, is more or less wrong.”

“I had to be self-contained, a kind of casual turtle carrying his house on his back.”

“A man's body is as the shell, or the tablet, of his soul, as he is reserved or ingenuous, overflowing or self-contained.”

“There were thousands of households throughout that city and there was something happening in all of them. There was some kind of story in each, but self-contained. No one else knew. No one else cared.”