Luigi Pirandello

best thing to do would be to renounce the hopeless undertaking and be content with living for myself, without seeing myself, and without concerning myself with any thought of others. The idea that others saw in me one that was not the I whom I knew, one whom they alone could know, as they looked at me from without, with eyes that were not my own, eyes that conferred upon me an aspect destined to remain always foreign to me, although it was one that was in me, one that was my own to them (a "mine," that is to say, that was not for me!)—a life into which, although it was my own, I had no power to penetrate—this idea gave me no rest.

—a life into which, although it was my own, I had no power to penetrate

I was nothing. No one. A poor, mortified body, waiting for someone to take it.

But I might also be another!

I had formed for myself no image of myself

What had my thoughts to do with that hair, hair of that shade, which might not have been there at all any more

Why, then, must I see myself in that body there, why must I see in it an inevitable image of myself?

And yet, all men in summary fashion knew me as that reddish hair, those greenish eyes, and that nose: the whole of that body, which for me was as nothing, mind you, nothing!

If I did not wish myself or feel myself to be as I saw myself, then it was a stranger to me as well

without that poor mortified body's having said a word to me, and quite beyond any will of my own.