“We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.”
Source: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Maggie O'Farrell 4
British writer 1972Related quotes
Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 1, Keeping The Beat, p. 6.

“The features of our face are hardly more than gestures become, by habit, permanent.”
Les traits de notre visage ne sont guère que des gestes devenus, par l'habitude, définitifs.
http://books.google.com/books?id=aYAHAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Les+traits+de+notre+visage+ne+sont+gu%C3%A8re+que+des+gestes+devenus+par+l'habitude+d%C3%A9finitifs%22&pg=PA175#v=onepage
Source: In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol II: Within a Budding Grove (1919), Ch. IV: "Seascape, with a Frieze of Girls"

Source: The Magnificent Defeat

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 373.

George Herbert Mead (1926). "The Nature of Aesthetic Experience." International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Jul., 1926), pp. 382-393; p. 382

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)
Context: We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds... A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.