E. Michael Murphy

“The novelist Thomas Wolfe, recalling a lifelong struggle with illness, wrote in his last letter, “I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I’ve seen the dark man very close.” I had not made the journey myself, and I had only seen the darkness reflected in the eyes of others. But surely, it was the most sublime moment of my clinical life to have watched that voyage in reverse, to encounter men and women returning from the strange country—to see them so very close, clambering back.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee

“This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Stephen looked coldly on the oblong skull beneath him overgrown with tangled twine-coloured hair.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man