I have every useless thing in the world in my house there. The only thing wanting is the necessary thing, a great patch of open sky like this. Always… - Marcel Proust

...my house contains every useless thing in the world. it lacks only the one essential, a piece of sky like this one...

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years - and it opens.

Faced with the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as the world's first natural philosophers must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, before their science had been elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown.