" Sigmund Freud finished what was to be his final reading. “Freud did not read at random,” Schur tells us, “but carefully selected books from his library.”8 His final choice fell on Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin. When he finished the book—the day before he called for the fatal injection—he remarked to Schur: “This was the proper book for me to read; it deals with shrinking and starvation.” Not only with shrinking and starvation but with all that precedes the final outcome of human desire: wanting, having, possessing, devouring. "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives