“... which she had read before she was nine. She also read Jack London’s Martin Eden, a book about a self-taught writer which she later suspected had given her inspiration for her future life. A schoolteacher called Mr Starkie, recognising an unusual capacity in the girl, lent her The Sorrows of Young Werther. She started keeping a diary when she was 12. She ...”

“... we draw the line between dress and costume, between life and art? Edith Sitwell was made to feel self-conscious about her appearance as a child. As an adult she made sure that everyone else would be conscious of it too; this was dress as the performance of personality. My thoughts about women and their clothes, how they wear them and also how they write ...”

“... he was pre-eminent among British psychoanalysts.I don’t think that living through an artificial self, which is what had got me into such an awful mess, is all that uncommon. The condition is difficult to recognise because it is concealed from the world, and from the subject, with ruthless ingenuity. It does not feature in the standard catalogue of neurotic ...”

“... and takes the shaman route of older beliefs. Once, in a train derailment, I bore my sense of self so lightly it yearned for those middle heights. Probably, when dying, we rise above and see nurses acting in perfect democracy. We’ll not romanticise shamans; but whatever our job or class there can always be some dream train where we’re squashed in by ...”

“... their love is pure, as pure as I’d wish the daughter-love to be in a Britain from which I’m self-exiled. This is the night of the eclipse: by 12.30 a thumb print blurs half the moon, and something restless and unachieved follows me through sleep. The roar of the garbage truck wakes me up and releases through my window screen the ill smell of the weekend ...”

“... to branch as the boat slides past, but silent, like a person who has learned to do without the self as worthy foe, settling, instead, for something in the night that tracks him from afar, some faint device unspooling in an empty Nissen hut, the data insufficient to predict a future he could happily imagine, no universal constant, no dark matter, only a ...”

“... the story told again, without this subject crouched in the midst of it all: the hangnail self adopted for a while, and then discarded. There must be songs for this, and minerals the body takes for granted, shifts and pulls that might have wandered elsewhere, were they not so battened down; and, even if nothing comes, as we disembark to goods and ...”

“... personal wholeness? a congerie of chemical elements? of truths held self-             evident? – how do I see them? – to be alive,             is it             to be             faithful? to be an arch, a list, a suddenly right ...”

“... Vanishing act – through dowel-holes in the wreck – Into bottles but without a message, only Self-effacement in sand, additional eddies. There’s no such place as heaven, so let it be The Carricknashinnagh shoal or Cahir Island where you honeymooned in a tent Amid the pilgrim-fishermen’s stations, Your spillet disentangling and trailing off Into the ...”

“... in the know. We didn’t expect ‘thistle seed’ to be thistle seed but we did expect to feel self-satisfied, maybe even smug. It wasn’t meant to be at all like this when we stared into the ...”

“... see me as theproject I am for this planet, earth, the one who needs work, accursed, material, my self, myone singular war memorial, my own native land, temporary, what shall I search for in thecity of searches, part of the circuitry in here with you, animated, these are not actualwords, they come out as integers you track, where are the crumbs, where are the ...”

“... lowered –I suppose with everything else going onit can pretend it’s not happening. Deception,self-deception, advance by degrees,my dead friend reminds me, and who hasn’tbrought themselves to harm becausethey thought they had to? The dead can be kinderthan the living, if you are not related to them.The anger I would give Orionis what has been given ...”

“... This strenuous giving and receiving of sadomasochistic sex was surely only another form of self-punishment. It was the gay aping the worst excesses of the chauvinistic sexist male, treating his sexual partner with insensitivity and cruelty. What is more, the receiver fully colluded with the act. Both the gays in the partnership were as fully locked ...”

“... to the house looking for something. All I wanted to see, though, were some sketches towards a self-portrait that John Butler Yeats had made in New York towards the end of his life. After lunch, Michael Yeats motioned me to follow him into the hallway. He opened a long drawer in an old chest and began to rummage until he found, wrapped in tissue ...”

“... of the audience, how high a place does he fall from? A further ambiguity comes in with the hint of self-mockery that was inevitable with Welles in the lead. Every detail of the portrait suggested a curious intuition: this hero who loves himself and betrays others never entirely fools himself. He exists to draw people in, to make them enjoy no world but ...”