“And now once again I asked myself the question: do I love her? And once more I could not answer, that is to say, again, for the hundreth time, I answered that I hated her.”

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 1.
Context: All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

So Nasreddin said Let the half who know what I am going to say, tell it to the half who don't, and left.
Alice Kelsey, Once the Hodja (1943), ISBN 0679251014

As quoted in "Return of the time lord" in The Guardian (27 September 2005)

Source: This Lullaby

Source: The Warlord Wants Forever

Variant: Then she kissed him. Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 11

Source: How to Suppress Women's Writing