How we cite our quotes: (Preface if applicable, Paragraph)
Quote #7
Every day new souls kept springing up beside the host of old ones, making clamorous demands and creating confusion; and now I saw as clearly as in a picture what an illusion my former personality had been. (342)
Forget versions of reality, here Harry has more versions of himself than he can deal with. Are they all "real" versions of Harry, or are some of them invented and influenced by his new friends?
Quote #8
"You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and wireless." (425)
Harry's kind of like a Dungeons and Dragons fan: in his inner mind he's ready for all kinds of battles and adventures. The reality is that he's just sitting around playing cards with his friends.
Quote #9
There were youths, boys, schoolboys, scamps, children. Fifty-year-olds and twenty-year-olds played leap frog. Thirty-year-olds and five-year-olds, solemn and merry, worthy and comic, well-dressed and unpresentable, and even quite naked, long haired and hairless, all were I and all were seen for a flash, recognized and gone. (509)
Imagine that every age, attitude, and outfit you ever put on was somehow recorded and saved so that there could be multiple versions of you, all of them independent and ready to go off and live their own life. That's what Harry's about to experience in the Magic Theater.