Michael Stewart

“Get Up! Go out! Do something! But what - what was worth doing? What had any meaning in it? She saw herself doing - extravagant things; nursing sick women; tending pale babies; making a speech in Parliament; riding a steeplechase; hoeing turnips in knickerbockers - decorative. And she lay perfectly still, bound by the filaments of her self-vision. So long as she saw herself she would do nothing - she knew it - for nothing would be worth doing! And it seemed to her, lying there so still, that not to see herself would be worse than anything. And she felt that to feel this was to acknowledge herself caged for ever.”
― John Galsworthy, The White Monkey