"[It was] told of the elephants by a king of their country, Juba, that when by the craft of their hunters one of them finds himself caught in certain deep pits that they prepare for them and cover with brush to fool them, his comrades arrive posthaste with many stones and logs to help him get out. But this animal in so many other actions approaches human capacity that if I wanted to trace in detail what experience has taught us about him, I should easily win the argument that I ordinarily maintain, that there is more difference between a given man and a given man than between a given animal and a given man."

—Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebon (1575-1576, 1578-1580), trans. Donald M. Frame

"She had lived with long-haired men and short-haired women, she had contributed a flexible faith and an irremediable want of funds to a dozen social experiments, she had partaken of the comfort of a hundred religions, had followed innumberable dietary reforms, chiefly of the negative order, and had gone of an evening to a séance or a lecture as regularly as she had eaten her supper."

—Henry James, The Bostonians (1886)

"At twenty-something he went off to London. Instinctively, he had already trained himself to the habit of feigning that he was somebody, so that his 'nobodiness' might not be discovered. In London he found the calling he had been predestined to: he became an actor, that person who stands upon a stage and plays at being another person, for an audience of people who play at taking him for that person. The work of a thespian held out a remarkable happiness to him—the first, perhaps, he had ever known; but when the last line was delivered and the last dead man applauded off the stage, the hated taste of unreality would assail him. He would cease being Ferrex or Tamerlane and return to being nobody. Haunted, hounded, he began imaging other heroes, other tragic fables. Thus while his body, in whorehouses and taverns around London, lived its life as body, the soul that lived inside it would be Caeser, who ignores the admonition of the Sybil, and Juliet, who hates the lark, and Macbeth, who speaks on the moor with the witches who are also the Fates, the Three Weird Sisters."

—Jorge Luis Borges, Everything and Nothing from The Maker (1960), trans. Andrew Hurley