"I looked at Violet's face in the photograph, and then at Bill, whose eyes were on his wife. His wife. His widow. The dead. The living. I picked up Erica's lipstick. My wife and her beloved characters in a dead man's books. Only fictions. But we all live there, I thought to myself, in the imaginary stories we tell ourselves about our lives, and then I picked up Matt's picture of Dave and Durango."

from What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt (2003)