— Ismail Yaseen in Miss Hanafy 

(1954)

And what would you do? Stay quiet and begin, “Don’t you know, my child, that you are only permitted to do these things in Holy Matrimony. You must avoid places and temptations to that sin, you must promise me that.” Or would you sit quiet and excite your own seed in the box with your hand or pressing against the wood and let it flow in the darkness, same as Onan; her rustling clothes and voice and smell sweeping through the wire grille. Her flesh beyond the wire hungered too for its fodder, the thrusting body of a man for her own. Or would you burst out of the box and take her in madness? She’d said she’d been a virgin. She’d cried out with hurt in the river meadows but the man would not stop, he took her against her will. Would she cry too when you the priest tore her clothes off and took her on the stone floor of the church? That might be your priest’s life, if you’d no control now was there chance it might be different then. At least you had a choice now to go out into the world and get women, but once you were a priest you were a priest for ever, there’d be no choice left, and once you were trapped in your own choice would you stay quiet in it or go crazy? A priest all your days, hair coming away by its white roots on your comb till baldness and death, and never in all those days to have touched and entered the roused flesh of a woman in her heat, never for your nakedness to be hid in her nakedness, never to be held in her softness, buried deep in the darkness of her red flesh, and her hands stroking the nerves to ecstasy.

— from The Dark by John McGahern

(1965)

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course we will play Francesca to Paolo, Brett Ashley to Jake, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

— from “On Self-Respect” by Joan Didion

1961 (2014)

As far as I can see, in the prolix confusion of uncertain fate all gods and all men are equal. In the obscure fourth-floor room where I live, they file past me in a succession of dreams, and they are no more to me than they were to those who believed in them. The fetishes of Negroes with frightened, bewildered eyes, the animal gods of savages from tangled wildernesses, the figures the Egyptians made into symbols, the bright divinities of the Greeks, the upright gods of the Romans, Mithras, lord of the Sun and of all emotion, Jesus lord of consistency and charity, various interpretations of that same Christ, new saints, the gods of the new towns, all file past to the slow march (is it a pilgrimage or a funeral?) of error and illusion. On they all march, and behind them come the empty shadows, the dreams that the more inept dreamers believe must have come down to live on earth, simply because they cast shadows. Pathetic concepts with neither soul nor face – Freedom, Humanity, Happiness, a Better Future, Social Science – they trail through the solitude of the dark like leaves dragged along beneath the train of a regal cloak, in the eternal exile of kings, a cloak stolen by the beggars who occupied the gardens of the house of defeat.

— from The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition by Fernando Pessoa, edited by Jerónimo Pizarro, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

1929 (2017)