In reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any momen… - Marcel Proust

As a man with imagination you can enjoy only in regret or in anticipation — that is, in the past or in the future.

Fall in love with a dog's bum,
And thou'll think it pretty as a plum.

He knew that the very memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he saw the elements of music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still almost entirely unknown) on which, here and there only, separated by the thick darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by a few great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that vast, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul which we take to be an impenetrable void.