He suddenly felt dismayed at how little he had seen of her the last two years; he had so few opportunities to press her hands in his to stop them fro… - Milan Kundera

Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions: -

(1) an elevated level of general well being which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities
(2) a high degree of social atomization and , as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;
(3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life.

What I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as character in our common love story. what wuld Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what would he be without the text of his part? What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence?

Where are all those virtues of unreason that have shaped our idea of love?