Happiness is salutary for the body but sorrow develops the powers of the spirit. - Marcel Proust

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 book.

Words present us with little pictures, clear and familiar, like those that are hung on the walls of schools to give children an example of what a workbench is, a bird, an anthill, things conceived of as similar to all others of the same sort. But names present a confused image of people — and of towns, which they accustom us to believe are individual, unique like people — an image which derives from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the color with which it is painted uniformly, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, because of the limitations of the process used or by a whim of the designer, not only the sky and the sea are blue or red, but the boats, the church, the people in the streets.

Ces jours uniques, ils se consument par l’usage, ils ne reviennent pas, on ne peut les vivre ici quand on les a vécus là.