One's life is peculiarly one's own when one has invented it. - Djuna Barnes

A man is another person — a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own. If she is taken you cry that you have been robbed of yourself. God laughs at me; but his laughter is my love.

And once Father Lucas said to me, 'Be simple, Matthew, life is a simple book, and an open book, read and be simple as the beasts in the field; just being miserable isn't enough — you've got to know how.' So I got to thinking and I said to myself, 'This is a terrible thing that Father Lucas has put on me — be simple like the beasts and yet think and harm nobody.

His sanity is an unknown room: a known room is always smaller than an unknown.