'The body may decline, may seem a dismal reflection of what went before, but the mind has a healthy continuity, and some kind of inbuilt fidelity to itself, a coherence over time. We learn, and experience; attitudes and opinions may change, but most people, it seems to me, retain an essential persona, a cast of mind, a trademark footprint. It is not so much that we simply get more like ourselves, as has been said, but that the self in question may expand, mutate, over time, but retains always that signature identity.'
Penelope Lively, Ammonites and Leaping Fish, p.42.
