It's kind of like when you look at yourself in the mirror and you say your name. And it gets to a point where none of it seems real. Well, sometimes I can do that, but I don't need an hour in front of a mirror. It just happens very fast, and things start to slip away. And I just open my eyes, and I see nothing. And then I start to breathe really hard trying to see something, but I can't. It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does, it scares me.

...I have had an unpleasant feeling, such as one has in a dream, that I myself do not exist.

I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable — indescribable — my misery amazing.

And if no one sees you, are you really there at all?

I lack myself.

I kept looking forward the answer to things. I kept looking, and I never saw, and I became lost. I lost myself, lost my own reality.

I thought much about myself. That is to say I often took a quick look at myself, closed my eyes, forgot, began again.

Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether I'm a character in one of my novels.

If I ever meet myself,' said Zaphod, 'I'll hit myself so hard I won't know what's hit me.

I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching.

I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception…. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic'd reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu'd, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me.

I’ll aways be wondering how you are, what you’re doing, if you’re all right, if there’s anything I could do to help you. I’ll even have to wonder if you’re still alive, won’t I?