Source: Aspects of the Novel (1927), Chapter Five: The Plot
Context: A man does not talk to himself quite truly — not even to himself: the happiness or misery that he secretly feels proceeds from causes that he cannot quite explain, because as soon as he raises them to the level of the explicable they lose their native quality. The novelist has a real pull here. He can show the subconscious short-circuiting straight into action (the dramatist can do this too); he can also show it in its relation to soliloquy. He commands all the secret life, and he must not be robbed of this privilege. "How did the writer know that?" it is sometimes said. "What's his standpoint? He is not being consistent, he's shifting his point of view from the limited to the omniscient, and now he's edging back again." Questions like this have too much the atmosphere of the law courts about them.
“No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.”
“He can be a charming man, but he can be quite nasty too. Because this is what he does.”
About Marco van Basten after the fall-out with Mark van Bommel
“He does not lose anything, for with the loss of himself he loses the knowledge of loss.”
Wolf Larsen, Chapter Six
The Sea-Wolf (1904)
vol. 1, p. 131
The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (1941)
No. 112
Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)
The Human Condition (1958), part 3, chapter 16.
“No one's reputation is quite what he himself perceives it ought to be.”
Northwest Europe, p. 188
Vokes - My Story (1985)
Niebla [Mist] (1914)
Context: Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself — that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks — he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech — this thing that they call a social product — was made for lying.
1 Corinthians 2:14,15 http://www.watchtower.org/e/bible/1co/chapter_002.htm
First Epistle to the Corinthians
