13 Quotes by MacDonald Harris

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.

We only betray ourselves.

Alcohol was for people who basically wished to be dead but lacked the courage to kill themselves.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have converted the machinery of my fate into the servant of my will.

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.