The phenomenon of the will [in Epictetus ] [...] a different mental ability whose chief characteristic is that it speaks an imperative even when it c… - Hannah Arendt

I came back [to school] in the fall, as a full-time boarder, with a certain set to my jaw, determined to go it alone. A summer passed in thoughtful isolation, rowing on a mountain lake, diving from a pier, had made me perfectly reckless. I was going to get myself recognized at whatever price. It was in this cold, empty gambler’s mood, common to politicians and adolescents, that I surveyed the convent setup. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.

To be curious about someone opened you to contamination from them. But she was still determined to play him a trick, to take a revenge for Kay, for women, and most of all for the impudence of his associating himself with her. She had no pity for Harald. Swinging the car into line behind the funeral procession, she waited for the question he would ask. “To be superior,” he said, “of course, is not only a prerequisite for tragedy; it is tragedy. Hamlet’s tragedy.

If the inner psychic ground of our individual appearance were not always the same, there could be no science of psychology, which qua science relies on a psychic “inside we are all alike,” just as the science of physiology and medicine relies on the sameness of our inner organs. […] The monstrous sameness and pervasive ugliness so highly characteristic of the findings of modern psychology, and contrasting so obviously with the enormous variety and richness of overt human conduct, witness to the radical difference between the inside and the outside of the human body.