For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety. - Marcel Proust

We betroth ourselves by proxy, and then feel obliged to marry the intermediary.

There is a degree of resemblance between the women we love at different times; and this resemblance, though it devolves, derives from the unchanging nature of our own temperament, which is what selects them, by ruling out all those who are not likely to be both opposite and complementary to us, who cannot be relied on, that is, to gratify our sensuality and wound our heart. Such women are a product of our temperament, an inverted image or projection, a negative of our sensitivity.

Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.