from My Commonplace Book (collecting)

Certainly Elisabeth did not know that every collector hopes with the never-attained, never-attainable and yet inexorably striven-for absolute completeness of his collection to pass beyond the assembled things themselves, to pass over into infinity, and, entirely subsumed in his collection, to attain his own consummation and the suspension of death.

—Hermann Broch, The Romantic (1930), vol. 1 of The Sleepwalkers