Hermann Broch

"That which had overcome him was something other than shame and more than shame: he who looks back on his life, sobered, and because of his sobriety perceives that every step of his erring path has been necessary and inevitable, yea, even natural, knows that this path of reversion was prescribed for him by the might of destiny and the might of the gods, that therefore he had been bound motionless to the spot, motionless despite all his aspirations to go forward, lost to the thicket of images, of language, of words, of sounds, commanded by fate to be entangled in the ramifications within and without." Hermann Broch from The Death of Virgil, p 142