(no subject)
"For I am--or I was--one of those people who pride themselves on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all--a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things that can be named--but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not."