Hotels thrust their occupants into a state of limbo even as they serve as a bulwark from the outside world. They can be both a welcome refuge and unsettlingly cold; homelike in their decor but cell-like in that what is there is often nailed down, and certainly not yours to keep. If part of a large chain, the rooms appear similar regardless of location, as Swiss photographer Roger Eberhard reveals in his photographic study Standard which showcases the unnerving sameness of Hilton hotel rooms around the world.

That there are no personal connections to the objects in a hotel room can, however, prove stimulating, particularly for artists. Maya Angelou wrote in near-barren hotel rooms when on the road—but also in her hometown. In the same way that Samuel Beckett flourished when he switched from writing in English to French—a language in which mère was just a word, emptied of all sentimental, maternal resonances—this emotionless environment allowed Angelou to continue writing.

“I go into the room and I feel as if all my beliefs are suspended,” she said, in The Paris Review. “No milkmaids, no flowers, nothing. I just want to feel and then when I start to work I’ll remember.” Cleaned every morning and returned to their original state, these rooms defy their inhabitants’ urge to leave their marks and yet invite them to keep trying, night after night.

The imagination can be invigorated within these rooms too, as snippets of conversation or mere voices, the words too hazy to discern, can be heard from neighboring rooms. Sometimes even a door is shared between strangers—a portal imbued with mysterious potential. What is happening behind that door, in that room that looks just like your own? Each guest is just one in an infinite series resting their heads on that pillow each night, dreaming there just as countless others have before them.

It is no accident that Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet set their enigmatic 1961 film, Last Year at Marienbad, in a baroque hotel. Its nameless characters traverse seemingly endless corridors that repeat themselves like Escher’s stairs. The movie set—a concatenation of multiple filming locations fused together through tricks of editing—reinforces the disorienting nature that so many hotels share. You might emerge from an elevator and move mechanically toward your room only to realize, upon trying your key, that you are on the wrong floor altogether.

In Paul Auster’s novel The Brooklyn Follies, a character details his impression of hotels, which had fascinated him as a child despite never staying in one. “The sole purpose of a hotel was to make you happy and comfortable, and once you signed the register and went upstairs to your room, all you had to do was ask for something and it was yours,” he says. “A hotel represented the promise of a better world, a place that was more than just a place, but an opportunity, a chance to live inside your dreams.”

As rewarding as that promise might seem, it has a melancholic underside. Though some may have their permanent address at the Plaza in New York City, hotels really exist for the itinerant. Guests may experience that utopic hope within the walls of these temporary homes, but that feeling must always remain there, for those who come later to enjoy—and leave behind in turn.