Status Updates From A Portrait of the Artist as...

His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave-clothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

Perhaps they had taken refuge in number and noise from the secret dread in their souls. But he, apart from them and in silence, remembered in what dread he stood of the mystery of his own body.

The commadment of love bade us not to love our neighbors as ourselves with the same amount and intensity of love but to love him as ourselves with the same kind of love.

A restless feeling of guilt would always be present: he would confess and repent and be absolved, fruitlessly. Perhaps that first hasty confession wrung from him by fear of hell had not been good? Perhaps, concerned only for his imminent doom, he had not sincere sorrow for his sin? But the surest sign that his confession had been good and that he had sincere sorrow for his sin was, he knew, the amendment of his life.

Do you ever self-insert into a novel so hard that if it doesn’t end up going well for the main character it’s going to make you feel hopeless?