“I stood, looking down at the worn pavement, so minutely and illegibly inscribed; and I saw the feet, my own among them, pass and repass. I stretched out a leg and tapped with my live toe, listening meanwhile, tap, tap, tap—and suddenly I felt that if I might only lend my own sound, my own flesh, my own power of choosing the future, to those invisible feet, I would pay anything—anything: but knew in the same instant that […] I would never pay more than a reasonable price.”

—William Golding, The Pyramid