From The Man Without Qualities

For Swar

From Chapter 21 of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities:

Brought up in a religious and feudal spirit, never exposed to contradiction through having to deal with middle-class people, not unread, but as an aftereffect of the clerical instruction of his sheltered youth prevented for the rest of his life from recognising in a book anything other than agreement with or mistaken divergence from his own principles, he knew the outlook of more up-to-date people only from the controversies in Parliament or in the newspapers. And since he knew enough to recognise the many superficialities there, he was daily confirmed in his prejudice that the true bourgeois world, more deeply understood, was basically nothing other than what he himself conceived it to be.

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Something very like this is what Swar and I were discussing in Bangalore in early May when we were discussing our dissatisfaction with recent IWE. 

What else do people mean when they use phrases such as You really got into my head there or You put my exact thought into words, and say them when they mean to praise?

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Of course, my recognition of the truth of the quoted passage only shows that I am equally susceptible to the glow that the confirmation of prejudice gives. When such truth is spoken by someone with talent and precision, it elevates one's own regard for one's intelligence.