Christine monologue (Act 2) — Master Olof: A Drama in Five Acts

So you want me to be shut up in a convent cell to live a lifeless life in ignorance? (Olof does not reply.) You want me to weep away my life and my youth, and to keep on saying those endlessly long prayers until my soul is put to sleep? No--I won't do it, for now I am awake. All around me they are fighting, and suffering, and despairing. I have seen it, but I was to have no share in it. I was not even to look on, or to know the purpose of the fighting. You wanted me to be sunk in bestial slumber. But don't you believe me possessed of a soul, then--a soul that cannot be satisfied by bread or by dry prayers put into my mouth by others? "Bind not the spirits," you said. Oh, if you could only know how that word pierced me! Daylight came, and those wild cries out there sounded like the singing of birds in the morning--