Split

For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives' tales they overhead, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things you can't come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them. You can only know them if you are them.
~ Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge