"How despicably I have acted!" she cried; "I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity in useless or blameable mistrust! How humiliating is this discovery! Yet, how just a humiliation! Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly. Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our aquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment I never knew myself."

"Love was a damaging mistake and its accomplice,hope, a treacherous illusion".

I now think, Love is rather deaf, than blind, For else it could not be, That she, Whom I adore so much, should so slight me, And cast my love behind.

My life had got on the wrong track, and my contact with men had become now a mere soliloquy. I had fallen so low that, if I had had to choose between falling in love with a woman and reading a book about love, I should have chosen the book.

"Thus every evening brought its new conversation, and with each evening, some new phase of her fathomless mind disclosed itself. She kept no secret from me. Her talk was only thinking and feeling aloud, and what she said must have dwelt with her many long years, for she poured out her thoughts as freely as a child that picks its lap full of flowers and then sprinkles them upon the grass. I could not disclose my soul to her as freely as she did to me, and this oppressed and pained me. Yet how few can, with those continual deceptions imposed upon us by society, called manners, politeness, consideration, prudence, and worldly wisdom, which make our entire life a masquerade! How few, even when they would, can regain the complete truth of their existence! Love itself dares not speak its own language and maintain its own silence, but must learn the set phrases of the poet and idealize, sigh and flirt instead of freely greeting, beholding and surrendering itself, I would most gladly have confessed and said to her:
"You know me not," but I found that the words were not wholly true."

To put it in a rather vulgar way, I had been dreaming about love in the firm belief that I could not be loved, but at the final stage I had substituted desire for love and felt a sort of relief. But in the end I had understood that desire itself demanded for its fulfillment that I should forget about the conditions of my existence, and that I should abandon what for me constituted the only barrier to love, namely the belief that I could not be loved. I had always thought of desire as being something clearer than it really is, and I had not realized that it required people to see themselves in a slightly dreamlike, unreal way.

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.