“Nobody grows up.  Everybody carries  around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger.  Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt.  But perhaps it becomes a duty to abandon the stock of time that one carries within oneself, to discard it in favour of the present, so that one’s embrace may be turned outward to the world in which one has made one’s home.”

–Anita Brookner, Latecomers