An Innocent Millionaire

p. 321

Thieves disregard the bond between a person and his property. But there is one: ” . . . women who come home to find that their house or apartment has been burglarized . . . speak of feeling raped, and many otherwise healthy old people die because they’re bereft of some object stolen from them . . . . Things grow into the soul.” It’s part of aging. For the young, too, though, items may be kept and kept. “It is as if each cherished object were a photograph capturing a moment irretrievably gone . . . . Possessions are proof, concrete evidence of all that has disappeared; to rob a man of what he has is to rob him of his past, to tell him that he didn’t live, that he only dreamed his past.’