There is a recognition that some readers will know. You read a sentence in a book you have not previously opened, and you find that the sentence was already in your possession. Not because you have read it before. Because you had been carrying the thought it names and had not, until that moment, known how to set it down.

The book did not give you the thought. It gave you the words for a thing you already knew. What it changed was the distance between you and the thing.

A friend of mine, a poet, calls this finding your own sentence in another writer's coat pocket. The image is right and slightly wrong. The coat pocket holds a sentence that fits you. But the coat is not yours; the sentence was not yours to begin with. Possession and recognition are different relations to the same words.

I have been thinking about who owns a sentence the reader recognizes. Not the writer who first published it. Not the reader who, hearing it, knew it as theirs.

What I have come to is that the sentence belongs to no one. The sentence was a thing the language had been making room for, in the writers and readers it passed through, for as long as people have been writing the language. When a writer publishes it, the writer has not invented it. The writer has caught it, briefly, on its way past. When a reader recognizes it, the reader has not received it from the writer. The reader has felt the same thing the writer felt — the language briefly settling on a shape it had been moving toward.

The writer and the reader are not in possession of the sentence. They are in possession of having been at the same place at the same time, which is rarer.