A picture’s beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it. - Marcel Proust

This malady which Swann’s love had become had so proliferated, was so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so utterly inseparable from him, that it would have been impossible to eradicate it without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his love was no longer operable.

the comfort of reclusion, the poetry of hibernation

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.