“Love, sought as an escape from the burden of the self, turns rapidly into a captivity.”

“So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape (...)”

“He had discovered that the choice between self-love or love of something other than self offers no escape from suffering either way, it is merely a choice between two woundings, of the pride or of the heart.”

“Was a sadness so profound that the mind sought escape into fantasy?”

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.”

“The seductive invitation of metamorphosis - of turning into something other — has continued to suffuse fantasies of identity; on the one hand holding out a way of escape from humanity, on the other annihilating the self.”