The eyes, if one knows them well, rarely lie (chapter XXII, p342) - Marie Vieux-Chauvet

Freedom is an inmost power. That is why society limits it. In the light of day our thoughts would make monsters and madmen of us. Even those with the most limited imagination conceal something horrifying. Our innumerable flaws are proof of our monstrously primitive origin. Rough drafts that we are. And we will remain so as long as we lack the courage to hack a path through the tangled undergrowth of life and walk with eyes fixed on the truth. The hard conclusion to an ephemeral life on the road to perfection. One can't reach it without sacrifice and suffering. I would like to be sure that Beethoven died satisfied to have written his concertos. Without this certainty, what would be the point of the painful anxiety of a Cézanne searching for a color that escapes him? Or of the anguish of a Dostoyevsky grasping at God in the thoughts swarming within the hellish complexity of the soul! All of them proof of another life, mysterious and intangible, clamoring for its share of immortality. Each of us must find within ourselves the possibility to meet such demands. It is a matter of will and action. Of choosing to be puppets or to be human beings. As for me, I sometimes feel I have gone off course, standing for years in front of a door that would not open for me and that I was afraid to force. Afraid perhaps out of sheer terror of facing the truth. When the time comes to follow my own path, I lose my nerve. Oh, what wouldn't I give to seize the essential thread of my thought once and for all! Something I can't define is rising from my innermost being in short-lived flashes. And here I am, my hands open and more empty than ever. (p72-3)

Amazing how love cancels out all other feelings. (p23)

...she led a dignified and modest life. But society, spiteful and querulous, always seeking sacrificial victims, never forgave her. Her parents themselves had fueled the scandal by punishing her so spectacularly, for fear people would say they weren't raising her right. (p107)