Each one of us is alone in the world… We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. – W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence, 1919

Reputation is in itself only a farthing candle, of a wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit. – James Russell Lowell

Sometimes at night I light a lamp so as not to see. – Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin