'the unfathomed distances in himself'

From the first, the baby stirred in the young father a deep, strong emotion he dared scarcely acknowledge, it was so strong and came out of the dark of him. When he heard the child cry, a terror possessed him, because of the answering echo from the unfathomed distances in himself. Must he know in himself such distances, perilous and imminent?

—D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915)

'all things end by becoming me'

Morning after morning, when I saw her kneel among the communicants waiting for the communion, I, who knelt behind her, wanted to stroke her ankle in her shoe. Her curls under her father's old hat became the curls of all the women in the world; her waist was the waist of a statue; she was losing her identity for me already, merged into myself. But that is the misfortune of my nature, that all things end by becoming me until now, nothing exists that is not me.

—Seán O'Faoláin, Bird Alone (1936)

The Hero of My Own Life

Ellen: "Those days you never seemed to get tired of David Copperfield."

Trond: "It's a long time since I last read that one." [...]

Ellen: "Then I think you should read it again," she says, and resting her chin in one hand with her elbow on the table she says:

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."

She smiles again and says, "I always thought those opening lines were a bit scary because they indicated we would not necessarily be the leading characters of our own lives. I couldn't imagine how that could come about, something so awful; a sort of ghost-life where I could do nothing but watch that person who had taken my place and maybe hate her deeply and envy her everything, but not be able to do anything about it because at some point in time I had fallen out of my life, as if from an aeroplane, I pictured it, and out into empty space, and there I drifted about and could not get back, and someone else was sitting fastened into my seat, although that place was mine, and I had the ticket in my hand."

--Per Petterson, Stealing Horses (2005)