I use bits and pieces of others [sic] personalities to form my own. [p. 95]

I felt myself still reliving a past which was no longer anything more than the history of another person;

It was not I who lived, but life rather that lived me.

I have a habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am now leading a posthumous existence.

I tasted life.

My life is a creative act — like a painting, or a concerto.

To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

Even now I am perhaps not speaking from myself: but from some character in whose soul I now live.

There it was before her - life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.

One sees life as part of oneself; a hint as to which particular part is all that is needed to convey meaning.

The artist secretes nostalgia around life.

I would say that I just gave you a taste of life.