An hour is not merely an hour; it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates. - Marcel Proust

The differences which exist between every one of our real impressions — differences which explain why a uniform depiction of life cannot bear much resemblance to the reality — derive probably from the following cause: the slightest word that we have said, the most insignificant action that we have performed at anyone epoch of our life was surrounded by, and colored by the reflection of things which logically had no connection with it and which later have been separated from it by our intellect which could make nothing of it for its own rational purposes, things, however, in the midst of which — here the pink reflection of the evening upon the flower-covered wall of a country restaurant, a feeling of hunger, the desire for women, the pleasure of luxury; here the blue volutes of the morning sea and, enveloped in them, phrases of music half emerging like the shoulders of water-nymphs — the simplest act or gesture remains immured as within a thousand vessels, each one of them filled with things of a color, a scent, a temperature that are absolutely different one from another, vessels, moreover, which being disposed over the whole range of our years, during which we have never ceased to change if only in our dreams and our thoughts, are situated at the most various moral altitudes and give us the sensation of extraordinarily diverse atmospheres.

She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That's the only way to get really good ones. And they're the rarest of luxuries.

É, de resto, uma das coisas mais terríveis para o apaixonado que, sendo os fatos particulares - que só a experiência, a espionagem, entre tantas realizações possíveis, dariam a conhecer - tão difíceis de descobrir, a verdade, em compensação, seja tão fácil de conhecer ou, em todo caso, de pressentir.