Excerpt: "...The public self operates with the smooth, surveilled efficiency of an institution that has forgotten it was built to serve a human being; it monitors, adjusts, presents the appropriate face for the appropriate audience, and the monitoring has become so total that the private self has started to feel like contraband in its own skin..."

Excerpt: "...You have been so occupied with the social choreography of saying things pleasantly that the thing itself, the raw, unpolished, competitive, Aries-fired creative act, has gone unattended. Stop confusing being interesting, well-liked, and socially impressive with the harder task of saying something original. Your habit of tailoring your ideas to the room’s comfort has drained them of force, risk, and consequence...."

Excerpt: "...yet the more twelfth-house fact is this: everybody else can see the softer creature in you moving underneath it. They see the tenderness in the pauses, the beauty-sickness, the longing to be met without first having to win, dominate, or unsettle the room. The only one still treating that hidden self as classified material is you..."