"Doubtless, in such perfect coincidences such as this, when reality folds back and overlays what we have long dreamed of, it completely hides it from us, merges with it, like two equal beings superposed figures which appear to be one, whereas, to give our happiness its true meaning, we would rather preserve for all those separate points of our desire, at the very moment in which we succeed in touching them -and to be quite certain that it is indeed they- the distinction of being intangible . . . And our thoughts cannot even reconstruct the odd state in order to compare it with the new, for it is no longer a clear field: . . . the memory of those first, unhoped for moments, are there now to block the passage of our consciousness, and as they control the outlets of our memory far more than those of our imagination, they react more forcibly upon our past, which we are no longer able to visualize without taking them into account, than upon the form, still unshaped, of our future." -The Rememberance of Things Past, Marcel Proust

"Does reality take shape in memory alone?" -The Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust

"For even if we have the sensation of being always enveloped in, surrounded by our own soul, still it does not seem a fixed and immovable prison; rather do we seem to be borne away with is, and perpetually struggling to transcend it, to break out into the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear endlessly all around us that unvarying sound which is not an echo from without, but the resonance of a vibration from within." -The Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust

"We construct a statue in our own image inside ourselves -idealized, you know, but still recognizable- and spend the rest of our lives engaged in the effort to make ourselves in its likeness. This is the moral imperative. . . Only there are times when I can't tell which is the statue and which is me." -The Untouchable, John Banville