The Adventures Of Augie March - Chapter XXI

"I'd better be cured of my attitudes. The reason why I didn't see things as they were was that I didn't want to because I couldn't love them as they were. But the challenge was not to better them in your mind but to put every human weakness into the picture - the bad, the criminal, sick, envious, scavenging, wolfish, the living-on-the-dying. Start with that. Take the fact that people generally were full of loathing and it cost them an effort to look at one another. Mostly they wanted to be let alone. And they dug for unreality more than for treasure, unreality being their last great hope because they could doubt that what they knew about themselves was true."