A tide began to surge beneath the calm surface of Stephen's friendliness. This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am. Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. In your heart you are an Irishman but your pride is too powerful. My ancestors threw off their language and took another, Stephen said. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy that I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for? For our freedom, said Davin. No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Wolfe Tone to those of Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I'd see you damned first. They died for their ideals, Stevie, said Davin. Our day will come yet, believe me. Stephen, following his own thought, was silent for an instant... When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets ... Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.
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Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
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Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
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The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.
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Please write again soon. Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into others lives and I come back to my own with greater contentment.
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Many times a day I realize how much my own life is built on the labors of my fellowmen, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.
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This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and ... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall a...
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For a moment I lost myself, actually lost my life. I was set free! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life . . . to life itself. I caught a glimpse of something greater than myself.
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I want to crawl to her feet, whimper to be forgiven, for loving her, for needing her more than my own life, for belonging to her more than my own soul.
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Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life; or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
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'I'm thinkin about takin my own life, I might aswell. Except they might not sell weed in hell...
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... it is true that I do not respect [human life] more than I respect my own life. And if it is easy for me to kill, that is because it is dif...
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