« She looked at the room around her, at her desk, at her books. None of this would belong to her for ever; it would change hands and somebody new would be here, somebody whop whould not even know who she had been, somebody who would look at her with astonishment if she came back, in some thought experiment, and said: That’s my desk — I want it. Our possessing of our world is a temporary matter: we stamp our ownership upon our surroundings, give familiar names to the land around us, erect statues of ourselves, but all of this is swept away, so quickly, so easily. » — Alexander McCall Smith