" However, as I reread her words I was none the less a little disappointed to realize how little of our person remains in our correspondence. Of course the characters we trace express our thoughts, as do our features; it is always a process of thinking that confronts us. But even so, in a person, thought appears to us only after being filtered through the bloom of the face, flowering like a water-lily only on the surface. And this, it has to be said, does modify it considerably. And perhaps one of the causes of our perpetual disappointment in love is this perpetual slippage, which causes every anticipation of the ideal being whom we love to be confronted at each meeting by a flesh-and-blood person who already has little in common with our dream. And then, when we expect something from this person, what we receive from her is a letter where very little of the person herself remains, as in those letters used in algebraic formulae, where there remains none of the qualities characterized by the arithmetical numbers, which themselves already no longer encapsulated the properties of the fruit or the flowers that were being assessed. "

― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva