Yet I am extremely dissatisfied with this portrait, and nevertheless I am satisfied with being dissatisfied with myself. Alas! that we cannot paint directly with our eyes! On the long journey from the eye through the arm to the pencil, how much is lost!
My pain's not ashamed to repeat itself.
Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me.
Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone.
Whatever happened to me in my life, happened to me as a writer of plays. I'd fall in love, or fall in lust. And at the height of my passion, I would think, "So this is how it feels," and I would tie it up in pretty words. I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled. For I knew I could take my broken heart and place it on the stage of The Globe, and make the pit cry tears of their own.
What was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs. When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?
I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat!
You get depressed because you know that you're not what you should be.
Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.
People have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.
Because I cannot work except in solitude, it is necessary that I live my work and that is impossible except in solitude.