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1 " I have converted the machinery of my fate into the servant of my will. "
― MacDonald Harris
2 " Who doesn't have a dark place somewhere inside him that comes out sometimes when he's looking in a mirror? Dark and light, we are all made out of shadows like the shapes on a motion-picture screen. A lot of people think that the function of the projector is to throw light on the screen, just as the function of the story-teller is to stop fooling around and simply tell what happened, but the dark places must be there too, because without the dark places there would be no image and the figure on the screen would not exist. "
― MacDonald Harris , Mortal Leap
3 " We only betray ourselves. "
― MacDonald Harris , The Balloonist
4 " But I know too that if we ever make a world without shadow, if the chemists and scientists and psychologists succeed in abolishing fear, pain, loneliness, death, some of us will find life so intolerable we will probably blow out our brains out of sheer boredom. "
5 " The resentment I felt inside was not hatred for being imprisoned or for Victor who had betrayed me but something deeper: a rebellion against the very way of things that condemned men to be imprisoned inside their own identities. "
6 " I was naked and he had more possessions than he could use all at once. I was the proletarian, he was the capitalist, and my relations to him were reduced to the basic proposition of all revolutions: die, I want what you have. It was the first time in my life I'd taken an interest in politics. "
7 " Alcohol was for people who basically wished to be dead but lacked the courage to kill themselves. "
8 " It was a part of myself that was my enemy; I still had a childish illusion that the flesh on my own bones was somehow unique and precious to the universe, in some obscure corner of my mind I wanted the others to love me and make exceptions for me simply because I felt heat and cold, pain and loneliness as they did. Now this was gone once and for all, and I understood there were no exceptions and on one was invulnerable, we all had to share the same conditions and in the end this was simply mortality, the mortality of things as well as ourselves. After that I didn't expect anybody to love me... "
9 " We only betray ourselves. No one is betrayed except by himself. One way to betray yourself is to try to be too many people at once."How many people should a person try to be in your opinion?"One at the most. Most people don't even succeed in that. "
10 " What happened was simple, even banal: I became naked, died, lost parts of my flesh and most of my ego along with a few illusions such as a belief in the uniqueness of my personal scrap of consciousness and the cosmic importance therof, and went on from there. "
11 " The books were a private part of me that I carried inside and guarded and didn't talk to anybody about; as long as I had the books I could convince myself I was different from the others and my life wasn't quite as stupid and pointless. "
12 " I still had the sensation I was playing a role but it didn't bother me any more, because I knew now that everybody else played a role too; it was just that some played them well and some badly. "
13 " Somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific is a copy of The Forsyte Saga I heaved overboard one afternoon. I very quickly saw what was wrong with it; Galsworthy was a gentleman, and no gentleman would ever write a good book. "
14 " I don't think you have any control over who you are-it just happens. Sometimes in the morning I wake up and don't know who I am. I have to get out of bed and open the closet door, and then I think, oh yes, I'm the girl in the red dress. "
15 " Is there anybody who would like to have written on his forehead a record of the places where he has slept? We are all innocent, in the end, and all guilty. We move blindly toward our sins, and the things we do and the things we suffer for don't have much to do with each other. In the end there's no justice: the universe is not an auditing firm. Would we like it better if it were? If we had to pay for everything, down to the last cruelty, the last fornication, the last harmless lie? Let's leave the dark places where they are. "
16 " I wondered if the others felt it too, the pointlessness of everything and the impossibility of changing the way you were, or whether they had somehow managed to come to terms with it in their own way. "
17 " Taxis! Streets! The city was full of people hurrying somewhere, people who had appointments, jobs, friends, complications, projects, crises. The emotion and intensity of it bewildered me, and the thought that I was going to have to live and move in this world and hurry around like these people made me tired. "
18 " My mistake had been that I had never really thought it out and come to terms with what I was doing. I had thought I was trying to be something I was not or change myself into an image of something I had only a rather vague notion of, a kind of a half-baked Platonic form of what I thought I was supposed to be. "
19 " It wasn't a matter of convincing these people or anybody else that I was something I was not, or even trying to make myself into something they wanted me to be. It was a matter of myself into something I would decide; of asking myself what was the best I had and what I could make with it, and then working as hard as I could to make it. "
