Quote used by Ruth Ozeki in A Tale for the Time Being 📚 —

In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader’s recognition in his own self of what the book says is proof of its truth.

— Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé