You're doing your thing, why can't I do my thing? I must be me even if I suffer for it.

I want you to be able to see me, and as my love for you is so much of me (all of me, making me more than myself) then you must see that too.

I am not a neurotic!""You're trembling with nerves and sensibility—""Of course I am, I'm an artist!

You've got to see me, Martin. I'm to blame. I've never been quite and entirely myself with you. The situation didn't let me be. The untruthfulness infected everything. I must break out a little? Do you see at all?

I saw . . . what I've really know all along, that you are my truth. For me you are the way the truth and the life. Only here can I be totally myself.

Oh my life is so awful, it's just so awful to be me, you don't know what it's like waking every morning and finding the whole horror of being yourself still there.

Misery had certainly given her energy, a sense of identity, a powerful questing will. It was even impressive. His part however was to be lucid and disappointing and cold. The least tenderness or excitement, the least foothold in his heart, and he and she would both be in danger.

The whole thing, the way it all happened, was shattering. And what it shattered most of all was some conception I'd had of myself, some wholeness.

Yet she knew too that she was deeply discontented and she sometimes suffered fierce feral moods of confused yearning during which it seemed to her that her whole life was a masquerade and that she was piously acting the part of a kindly affectionate serviceable woman who was just not herself.