The fear of finding oneself alone – that is what they suffer from – and so they don’t find themselves at all. - André Gide

مجازاتی تو جهنم وجود نداره جز اینکه مجبوری کارای ناتمامتو تموم کنی

[Marceline] sensed already what I was struggling to discover; and when I reproached her for believing too often in the virtues she herself had invented in the people we knew, she replied: ‘You’re never satisfied until you’ve made them reveal some vice. Don’t you realize that our own eyes magnify and exaggerate whatever they happen to see — that we make anyone become what we claim he is?’

I might have wished she were wrong, but I had to admit that to me each man’s worst instinct seemed the most sincere. Then, what was it I called sincerity?

Characters in a novel or a play who act all the way through exactly as one expects them to... This consistency of theirs, which is held up to our admiration, is on the contrary the very thing which makes us recognise that they are artificially composed.