“Sometimes, because I am a failure in the world, I blame my failure on you all; say that you got me so mixed up when I was young that I can never clear myself up again inside; or that you made me so false to myself that I am unreal and never can be real. But I must see that the reason I am a failure is that I gave myself away to everybody and so had none of myself left for myself—I mean the part of oneself that is the part he works with, held by himself to work with.

“And yet I collaborated with you in making myself false—for I was so afraid of myself and what it wanted to do, and so ashamed of it. So you and I together stomped the life out of it, every day, mangling it like a beetle.

“But suddenly something beyond all of us, greater than all of us, freed us from each other. We tore at our hearts because we were powerless against this thing that came in between us and wrenched us apart. This was loving somebody. (The House of Breath)