lines from Aciman's Roman Year

 I was nursing a secret, other life.  It did not make me more reticent than I usually was when others described their real or proclaimed exploits; instead, my secret made me surer of myself.  806 Kobo

Having a separate life gave my old bookish aloofness a new cast.

I love the ease it gave me to revisit all my private corners with the space of a few hours without having to tell anyone.  824

But I also needed this book to know who I was now and what stood behind me, as if Durrell's novel allowed me to intuit things that weren't in his book at all, but in me, except that I needed his voice and its cadence to draw closer to myself.  841

Maybe this was what I was after, not the city as I remembered it, but traces of a city that might never have iexisted but was reinvented and in a strange way more real on paper for me that night than was my memory of it.  Maybe this was why I liked books:  they were not as real as life; they offered an altered, transposed, and stylized version of the real that I liked better because it was more persuasive.  It had radiance; real life never did.  854.