“ If Anna was right, if a person was no more than a collection of habits, perhaps the habits were maintained only so as not to disappoint the lover that one slept beside each night. But what chance did that leave for becoming, one fine day, a wholly different being? Maybe it was he, after all, who had not been able to abide being accounted for, who had no longer wanted to be reached. Once there was a woman he loved. That was how it had begun. But from there the story might have unfolded any number of ways. Only the end was always the same: he had emptied himself of the ballast of memory and lunged weightless into the future. Alone and astonished, attempting to take with him not even a trace. In the end he had betrayed the woman he loved, and who was there who would not judge him for that? Anna, backward or forward, the name a ghost of itself. It he called her, if he could reach her now, what would there be to say? ”

— Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room