Quotes from Susan Heyboer O'Keefe

I know not who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am. I am in terrible ignorance of everthing. I know not what my body is, nor my senses, nor my soul, not even that part of me which thinks what I say, which reflects on all and on itself, and knows itself no more than the rest.

Men often become what they are told they are. If you repeatedly tell a man he is a slave, he will eventually forget how to think as a free man, although I am optimist enough to hope that there is something in a man that will always remain free.

All men dream, all men have a dream, all men want a dream.... I have none, What shall I put in its stead? I do not know.Melancholy is my only companion, and she does not dream either.

I lay unprotesting each touch bringing me exquisite pleasure and impossible pain.If only I had seen the smallest kindness in her face, if only there had not been such hunger... She stripped me in every way possible, herself remaining protected from revelation of her own soul.

We betray ourselves, don't we? In the end, we have no need for enemies.

This is what it meant to be human-to die. And I,who had been made of death, still had no part in humanity.

Grief can make a man careless

Do people look at me and see horror lurking just beneath this tattered skin? Or is it the reverse? Do they see that something is missing? the spark of divinity that makes a life human? I am a void, a chaotic abyss, that would swallow up the world.