...love, and consequently fear, of the crowd being one of the most powerful motives in all human beings... - Marcel Proust

We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.

In that way Vinteuil's phrase, like some theme, say, in Tristan, which represents to us also a certain acquisition of sentiment, has espoused our mortal state, had endued a vesture of humanity that was affecting enough. Its destiny was linked, for the future, with that of the human soul, of which it was one of the special, the most distinctive ornaments. Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is without existence; but, if so, we feel that it must be that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either. We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate. And death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain.

...the seaside life and the life of travel made me realise that the theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations.