Igor

“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

“We get anxious, and it is sometimes long after the hour of danger, which a subsequent distraction has made us forget, that we remember our anxiety.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

“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

“It is certain that she had represented something quite different for me in Balbec. But even when we consider it insufficient at the time, our intimacy with the woman we love creates between her and us, despite its painful shortcomings, social ties that outlast our love and even the memory of that love. Then, in the woman who is now no more to us than a means, a path toward others, we are just as astonished and amused to discover in our memory the original special appeal of her name for the other being we once were, as if, after giving a cabman an address on the Boulevard des Capucines or on the rue du Bac, thinking only of the person we are going to see there, we were to remind ourselves that these names were once those of the Capuchin nuns whose convent stood there and of the ferry across the Seine.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way