Right Writing Rite

"Bookish" is a reproach that is often directed at me; I lay myself open to it by my habit of always quoting those to whom my thought seems related. People think I took that thought from them; this is false; that thought came to me of itself; but I enjoy, and the more so the bolder the thought is, thinking that it has already inhabited other minds. When, reading them later on, I recognize my thoughts in them, as it happened with Blake, I  go crying their name everywhere and publishing my discovery. I am told that I am wrong. I don't care. I take pleasure in quoting and persuade myself, like Montaigne, that only in the eyes of fools do I appear any less personal for it.
     Those on the contrary who gather the ideas of others take great care to hide their "sources." — There are examples of this among us.
— André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, Volume II: 1914-1927, Justin O'Brien (tr.), 10 January, 1923, p. 320.

... Thus it is that all the events of life, as the events of the war did likewise, serve only to push each person farther in his own direction, so that nothing is more empty and illusory than what is commonly called "experience." — An experience teaches only the good observer; but far from seeking a lesson in it, everyone interprets the conclusion in his own way.
— André Gide, Ibid., p. 321.

     It is very bold to assert that you would have thought just the same without having read certain authors who will later seem to have been yout initiators. Yet it seems to me that had I not known Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Freud, X., or Z., I should have thought just the same, and that I found in them rather an authorization than an awakening. Above all, they taught me to cease doubting myself, not to be afraid of my thought, and to let myself be led by it, since moreover I found them in it.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1924, p. 347.

     I intend to give to those who read me strength, joy, courage, defiance, and perspicacity — but I am above all careful not to give them directions, judging that they can and must find them only by themselves (I was about to say "in themselves"). Develop at one and the same time the critical faculty and energy, those two contraries. Generally we find among intelligent people nothing but the stiff-jointed, and among men of action nothing but fools.
— André Gide, Ibid., p. 350.

     These words of Emanuel Fäy, which his brother repeated to me, these words which were almost his novissima verba, haunt me, obsess me: "There is no fun in playing in a world in which everyone is cheating."
— André Gide, Ibid., p. 422.

     Do not turn away, through cowardice, from despair. Go through it. It is beyond that it is fitting to find a motive for hope. Go straight ahead. Pass beyond. On the other side of the tunnel you will find light again.
— André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, Volume III: 1928-1939, Justin O'Brien (tr.), 1928, p. 33.