Our true history is scarcely ever deciphered by others.
The chief part of the drama is a monologue,
or rather an intimate debate between God, our conscience, and ourselves.
Tears, grieves, depressions, disappointments, irritations,
good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties, deliberations -
all these belong to our secret, 
and are almost all incommunicable and intransmissible,
even when we try to speak of them, and even when we write them down.
-Henri Frederic Amiel