For we are not as faithful to the being we have most loved as we are to ourselves and sooner or later we forget her — since that is one of our charac… - Marcel Proust

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures become, by habit, permanent.

We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening. The truth which one puts into one's words does not carve out a direct path for itself, it is not irresistibly self-evident. A considerable time must elapse before a truth of the same order can take shape in them.

Reading is at the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it. It does not constitute it ... There are certain cases of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline ... reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the Spirit.