Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to … - Marcel Proust

People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.

When a belief vanishes, there survives it — more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things — a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause — the death of the gods.

On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.