“... reveal themselves to be tawdry bits of stuff, unspectacular to the point of ugliness outside the self-referring mirrors of the machine. So when John Lennon wrote and performed the prophetic early song ‘There’s a place’, it was not he but the group voice that was felt to be confiding ‘There’s a place where I can go / When I feel low, when I feel ...”

“... The impression, as the orders arrive one after another, nearly a hundred of them so far, is of a self-amplifying state bent on overcoming the rule of law and testing the limits of authoritarian power. The effect on many has been to induce a sense of disorientation and terror; they wonder when, or whether, it will stop. Some wave the orders away, stressing ...”

“... In Professor Anscombe’s case at least, it is assumed that if there are such experiences they are self-intimating. What she seems to find questionable is whether they exist. However that may be, she assumes that, in the Goethe example, the only points at issue are whether he witnessed the events in question and did not need to be reminded of them. If these ...”

“... problem – though incredibly rich in some areas – was patchy, and blurred by a good deal of self-deception. He asked: what is the general structure and connection of human motives, including the unconscious as well as the conscious part of them? There is nothing wrong with this question, any more than with Darwin’s about the Origin of Species. Both ...”

“... she wouldn’t have been the only or the last woman to have been caught between the pressures of self-improvement and the puritan values of America. What’s a girl without congenital wealth to do if she hasn’t been blessed with some class-effacing talent or exceptional looks, when she knows that success in life is the result of an individual’s ...”

“... stories. Often structured around a quest, for a missing child, a vanished woman, a former self, a meaning, an answer, they finally take the form of a flight, as if from a horror too great to bear or name, a shock one can only circle again and again, and at last abandon. ‘Do I write to escape, to make a fiction of my life?’ Wideman asks in his ...”

“... the intentions behind her work enigmatic. One unfortunate but slightly comic consequence of this self-effacement was that she began to be confused with an American writer also named Dorothy Richardson, whose photograph kept haunting reviews of Pilgrimage. In exasperation, Richardson declared: ‘I think that about finishes me. I shall try advertisement ...”

“... cynicism to mind, but Eça’s characters, unlike Flaubert’s, taste the bitterness of genuine self-knowledge – though they soon forget the taste again. In the agony of his eventual separation from Amelia, Amaro sets out to write her a poem in the lyrical form that he remembers from his student days, but all that he can manage is two stanzas: ‘It ...”

“... grinding routine of a doomed Borgesian clerk than the process of happy alchemies effected by the self-nourishing creative imagination. You sometimes feel that the important thing for Emerson was just to keep on writing for writing’s sake – not for any climactic or residual statement, but for the sheer motion of the process. ‘All language is vehicular ...”

“... the more public dancer and bather pastels accorded their subjects a greater degree of modesty and self-respect. ‘It was in his monotypes,’ Richard Thompson observes in his study of the nudes, ‘rather than his pastels, that Degas most overtly exposed the female body to the male gaze.’ Callen disagrees. Her aim is to demonstrate that these diverse ...”

“... come. To grow old, as Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘is to define oneself’ and being defined, even self-defined, is privative as well as positive. The ascent to seniority prunes possibility: the old are what they are and, to a lesser extent, what they have been, though past achievements rarely compensate, often seeming more past than achievement. Even for ...”

“... wrote Lincoln Steffens. ‘She was large; she dressed as a large woman ... You felt ... her self-contentment and shared her self-composure, but, best of all, the prophetess gave you glimpses of what a Buddha can see by sitting still and quietly looking.’ This is the pattern of Stein’s extraordinary legend; she ...”

“... Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) presents, as White says in The Burning Library, ‘a gay hero so self-hating that even the most retrograde reader would become impatient with his inner torment and welcome with relief the Stonewall Uprising, which is the concluding scene in the novel’. The Farewell Symphony starts in 1994, and loops back into the early ...”

“... made life digestible for me. You re-invigorated me, like a tonic bath. When I was groaning with self-pity, feeling all alone, I used to say to myself: ‘Look at him’ and I would get back to work with renewed energy, You were my supreme moral emblem, and my perpetual edification. Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, 16 November 1852: Bouilhet and I, we ...”

“... for words which sound like the squelching of a leaky boot, raises this doctrine to the point of self-parody. In poetry like Heaney’s, you can hear the pluck and slop of brackish water as the signs button down snugly on their referents, whereas Donald Davie’s words stand at a chaster distance from his meanings. This, needless to say, is linguistic ...”