“My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can’t despise my whole life.”

Source: The Pact

Cited in Whitney Museum of American Art (1975 Brochure), "Minnie Evans" Call number ND237.E78 W43 1975

August 9, 1965, when Lee announced the separation of Singapore from Malaysia, as quoted in The Theatre and the State in Singapore: Orthodoxy and Resistance, Terence Chong
1960s

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), I : The Man of Flesh and Bone
Context: Everything in me that conspires to break the unity and continuity of my life conspires to destroy me and consequently to destroy itself. Every individual in a people who conspires to break the spiritual unity and continuity of that people tends to destroy it and to destroy himself as a part of that people.

Source: Entwined with You

Source: Death of a Salesman

1990s, Moab is My Washpot (autobiography, 1997)
Context: When I had first caught sight of Matthew I saw the beauty in everything. Now I saw only ugliness and decay. All beauty was in the past. Again and again I wrote in poems, in notes, on scraps of paper. My whole life stretched out gloriously behind me. If I wrote that sick phrase once, I wrote it fifty times. And I believed it, too.

Source: 1900s, Up From Slavery (1901), Chapter XVII: Last Words
Context: My whole life has largely been one of surprises. I believe that any man's life will be filled with constant, unexpected encouragements of this kind if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day of his life — that is, tries to make each day reach as nearly as possible the high-water mark of pure, unselfish, useful living.

Source: Vanishing Acts