Igor

“In point of fact, we always discover after the event that our adversaries had a reason for taking the side they do take, and one that does not depend on the degree to which that side is in the right, and that those who think as we do have been constrained to do so by, if their moral nature is too contemptible to be invoked, intelligence, and if they have no great acumen, uprightness.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

“I should have left that evening without ever seeing her again. I had a presentiment from then on that in a love that is not shared—or, in other words, in love, for there are people for whom there is no shared love—all we can taste of happiness is that simulacrum which had been granted me at one of those unique moments when a woman’s kindness, or her caprice, or chance applies to our desires, in a perfect coincidence, the same words and the same actions as if we had truly been loved.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

“But these recurrences of desire force us to reflect that, if we wanted to meet these girls again with the same pleasure, we should have also to go back to the year in question, which has since been followed by ten others, in the course of which the girl has faded. We can sometimes find a person again, but not abolish time. All this up until that unforeseen day, sad as a winter’s night, when we are no longer seeking that particular girl, or any other, and when to find one would alarm us even. For we no longer feel we have sufficient attractions to please, or the strength to love. Not, of course, that we are, in the true sense of the word, impotent. So far as love is concerned, we would love more than ever. But we feel that it is too great an undertaking for the little strength that we preserve. Our eternal rest has already introduced intervals, in which we cannot go out, cannot speak.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

“Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chooses the person one loves after endless deliberation and on the strength of diverse qualities and advantages.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah