I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not ravished.
--Djuna Barnes, quoted in Philip Herring, Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes; I'm against seeking dignity for oneself as a general rule, but I liked this line a lot and I think it explains some of why I speak much more freely in fiction than in my occasional attempts at memoir-type writing.

She said to herself, "Is not the gown the natural raiment of extremity? What nation, what religion, what ghost, what dream, has not worn it--infants, angels, priests, the dead; why should not the doctor, in the grave dilemma of his alchemy, wear his dress?"
--Nightwood

No one could intrude upon her because there was no place for intrusion. This inadequacy made her insubordinate--she could not participate in a great love, she could only report it.
--Nightwood

The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a "picture" forever arranged is, for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger. Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person's every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger pressing its breast to its prey.
--Djuna Barnes, Nightwood