Le bonheur est salutaire pour le corps, mais c'est le chagrin qui développe les forces de l'esprit. - Marcel Proust

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

Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.

The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme. Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.