Joke from 1930's Germany

"Conversations in heaven are popular. The best one: Hitler to Moses: 'But you can tell me in confidence, Herr Moses. Is it not true that you set the bush on fire yourself?'" -- from pg. 134 of The End of America, by Namoi Wolf

Henirch Boll, What's to Become of the Boy

"Not long ago, we were asked by Frank G., aged thirty-seven, born in the last year but one of the war, why we hadn't emigrated, and we found it hard to explain that such an idea was simply beyond the realm of our imagination: it was as if someone had asked why I hadn't ordered a taxi to the moon." -- pg. 29.

"Depressed, we would wend our way home, along the railway embankment, the dust of summer on our lips, the smell of the wheat fields-- I had it in my heart, my brain, my consciousness, that foretaste, which only a few years later, turned out to be correct: I knew that I would be caught up in it, that I lacked the strength and the courage to elude the two uniforms in store for me." -- pg. 46

Thinking in terms of archetypes

"[It was Beethoven's father's] role to play the amiable and ineffectual Dionysian, heir to the weaknesses of the flesh, as a foil for Maria Magdalena's suffering transcendence of life's tribulations." -- Solomon, pg. 14.

Try to resist the urge to act out an archetype. Such behavior amounts to role-playing, and self-actualization might involve nothing more than having the ability to choose traits from any archetype-- borrowing one character trait from one, and another from another, in a way that suits your personality.