Take a sheet of paper. Cut it square to size. Fold once across the middle. Fold again down the centre. Peel back the loose flaps. Slide your fingers inside the heart. Pull apart. A paper boat now lies on the table between us.
"A man is the history of his breaths and thoughts, acts, atoms and wounds, love, indifference, and dislike; also of his race and nation, the soil that fed him and his forebears, the stones and sands of his familiar places, long-silenced battles and struggles of conscience, of the smiles of girls and the slow utterance of old women, of accidents and the gradual action of inexorable law, of all this and something else too, a single flame which in every way obeys the laws that pertain to Fire itself, and yet is lit and put out from one moment to the next, and can never be relumed in the whole waste of time to come."
Possession by A.S. Byatt