" once this sequence of emotions and anxieties is forgotten, at least in so far as they attach to her, for they may have reappeared, but attached to somebody else. Before that, when these emotions and anxieties were still attached to her, we believed that our happiness depended upon her person: but it depended only on ending our anxiety. At that time, therefore, our unconscious was more clear-sighted than we were, reducing the beloved figure to such a small size, a figure which we ourselves had perhaps forgotten, which we might have known imperfectly and believed mediocre, in the terrible drama we enacted where our very lives might have depended on tracking her down in order to cease waiting for her. "

― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva