There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite bo… - Marcel Proust

The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.

And indeed when we are no longer in love with women whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss of death between them and ourselves, just as much as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that we are no longer in love makes the people that they were or the person that we were then as good as dead?

And even in my most carnal desires, oriented always in a particular direction, concentrated round a single dream, I might have recognized as their primary motive an idea, an idea for which I would have laid down my life, at the innermost core of which, as in my day-dreams while I sat reading all afternoon in the garden at Combray, lay the notion of perfection.