By art alone we can get out of ourselves, find out what another person sees of this universe which is not the same as ours... Thanks to art, instead … - Marcel Proust

Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.

Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.

The idea that one will die is more painful than dying, but less painful than the idea that another person is dead, that, becoming once more a still, plane surface after having engulfed a person, a reality extends, without even a ripple at the point of disappearance from which that person is excluded, in which there no longer exists any will, any knowledge, and from which it is as difficult to reascend to the idea that that person has lived as, from the still recent memory of his life, it is to think that he is comparable with the insubstantial images, the memories, left us by the characters in a novel we have been reading.