“Eventually we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, often at considerable expense and inconvenience; we dust and polish their surfaces and reprimand children for playing too roughly in their vicinity—all while allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance. This armoire, we are prone to recall, is the very one in which I had as a boy, and it was these silver candelabra that lined our table on Christmas Eve, and it was with this handkerchief that she once dried her tears, etcetera, etcetera, until we imagine that these carefully preserved possessions might give us genuine solace in the face of a lost companion.

But, of course, a thing is just a thing.”

~Amor Towles, in his novel A Gentleman in Moscow