كان لدى الناس عادة بأن ينظروا إلي كما لو أني كنت مرآة على نحو ما، بدلا من كوني شخصاً. لم يكونوا يرونني; كانوا يرون أفكارهم الشهوانية الخاصة. كانوا يتقنعون بقناع زائف من البراءة والطهر, بدعواهم إياي أنني أنا الشخص الفاسق.

Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, everything and anything except me.

She said my problem was that I saw things in people that they didn’t see in themselves.

I'd think, That ain't me, that ain't my face. It wasn't even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn't even really me then; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted. It don't seem like I ever have been me.

I looked at myself in the mirror and didn't like what I saw.

I didn't know that other people thought things about me. I didn't know that they looked.

Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you.

He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often — he searched for a simile, found one in his work — torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?

People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?

How can I clearly see what’s wrong with someone else, and then look at myself as though I’m standing in front of a fogged mirror?

We see people not as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

I’m just a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone else expects of me.

In my paranoid world every storekeeper thinks I’m stealing, every man thinks I’m a prostitute or a lesbian, every woman thinks I’m a lesbian or arrogant, and every child and animal sees the real me and it is evil.

The people stared through her as though she were invisible until she thought she was, and walked more easily then, just a cloud reflected in a stream.