Good Morning, Midnight - Jean Rhys

55
If someone had come to me and asked me if I wished to be born I think I should have answered No.  I'm sure I should have answered No.  But no one asked me.  I am here not throught my will.  Most things that happen to me - they are not my will either.  And so that's what I say to myself all the time: "You didn't ask to be born, you didn't make the world as it is, you didn't make yourself as you are.  Why torment yourself?  Why not take life just as it comes?  You have the right to; you are not on of the guilty ones. 

64
Well, what harm can he do to me?  He is out for money and I haven't got any.  I am invulnerable.

68
Yes, I'll have the sheets changed.  I'll lie in bed all day, pull the curtains and shut the damned world out. ...  There was a monsieur, but the monsieur has gone.  There was more than one monsieur, but they have all gone.  What an assortment!  One of every kind...

75
At this moment a taxi draws up.  Without a word he gets into it, bangs the door and drives off, leaving me standing there on the pavement.

And did I mind?  Not at all, not at all.  If you think I minded then you've never lived like that, plunged in a dream, when all the faces are masks and only the trees are alive and you can almost see the strings that are pulling the puppets.  Close-up of human nature - isn't it worth something?

88
But this is my attitude to life.  Please, please, monsieur et madame, mister, missis and miss, I am trying so hard to be like you.  I know I don't succeed, but look how hard I try.  Three hours to choose a hat; every morning an hour and a half trying to make myself look like everybody else.  Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights.

108
But it wasn't all that that mattered.  It wasn't that he knew so exactly when to be cruel, so exactly how to be kind.  ... He had gone out to buy something to eat.  I was behind the curtain and I saw him in the street below, standing by a lamp-post, looking up at our window, looking for me.  He seemed very thin and small and I saw the expression on his face quite plainly.  Anxious, he was... When I saw him looking up like that I knew that I loved him, and that it was for always.  It was as if my heart turned over, and I knew that it was for always.  It's a strange feeling - when you know quite certainly in yourself that something is for always.  It's like what death must be.