Defiance (n.) begins as despair over one's own weakness.
Defiance (n.) would choke even its own scream, lest it seem there were anyone left to defy.
Defiance (n.) would rather be itself with all the torments of hell than ask anyone for help.
Defiance (n.) gone mad consumes one's strength to conceal pain instead of using it to bear and vanquish pain.
Defiance (n.) makes the self its own absolute master — a king without a country, forever building castles in the air and dissolving them on a whim.
Defiance (n.) is to worship what envy is to admiration: weakness making itself unhappy by refusing to be weakness, as envy tortures itself by refusing to be what it is, admiration.
Defiance (n.) is the despair of wanting desperately to be oneself: it cuts the self off from the power that made it so that it can create itself.
Defiance (n.) wills to be a self — but a self it chose, not the one it is; it would tear itself from the Power that made it, and that Power is stronger.