"It seemed to me an error in reasoning for a man to isolate a woman he loves from all the circumstances in which he met her and in which she lives, to try, with dogged inner concentration, to purify her of everything that is not her self, which is to say also of the story that they lived through together and that gives love its shape.

After all, what I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as a character in our common love story. What would Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what could he be without the text of his part? What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence?"