“I’m not selfish. I’d gladly give someone’s life, a more valuable life than my own, while I humbly preserve and keep my own meager life for myself.”

“If I were king, I wouldn’t pay you the money I owe you. I’d give you a far more valuable gift: the gift of life—your own. Yes, you’d get to keep it!”

“I can’t help feeling possessive over you Layla. You’re the most valuable thing in my life and I won’t share you with anyone, ever. You’re everything to me. I’d kill for you. I’d give up everything I own just to keep you. You’re my whole universe and I couldn’t exist without you.”

“I shall bring him his tea and work myself to death by the time I am thirty bearing children and scrubbing floors and working in the fields digging turnips till my hands bleed and my back gives out and everyone urges me to keep on for just one more year, at which point I will die of exhaustion and the meagerness of my own life. I will love him and care for him, will never tell him to get his own tea, or sweep the ashes from the hearth or give birth to his own twelfth child himself.”

“More than my own life”

“I had to learn to think, feel and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink. The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life-preservers around their necks, and more often than not it is the life-preserver which sinks them.”