It's frightening, when you pause to think to what an extent you live up to people and are being lived up to in your turn, how generally you fake yourself in blind obedience to someone else's fantasy. The time comes when you wonder if you really are yourself and not a character that has been read about or seen in a movie. Whoever you are, you are the victim of someone else's enchantment, doomed, like the people in the fairy tales, to go through life in an alien form - to hop as a toad, bray as an ass or fly as a swan - until the kiss of true love honestly reciprocated releases you from your bondage and lets you be yourself.

- from Gerald Kersh, Fowlers End