Why, when we regain consciousness, is it not an identity other than the one we had previously that is embodied in us? It is not clear what dictates t… - Marcel Proust

"For then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself".

Marcel Proust
In Search of Lost Time, 1913

Our desires interweave with one another; and in the confusion of existence, it is seldom that a joy is promptly paired with the desire that longed for it.

There can be no peace of mind in love, since what one has obtained is never anything but a new starting point for further desires.

in a chapter called Desire and Despair