She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive. - Marcel Proust

السعادة مفيدة للجسد، لكن الأسى هو ما ينمي قدرات العقل.

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

But certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.