" And since he was inclined himself to the kind of irritating pretentiousness that he disapproved of—“What was the point of ‘turning on the charm’ for them so persistently if you don’t want to meet them again?”—I turned down his proposal, because I did not want to risk being parted from Albertine, but also because I was now detached from them. From them, that is to say, from myself. We desire passionately that there should be another life in which we would be similar to what we are here below. But we do not reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, but in this one, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we had wanted to remain immortally. "

― Marcel Proust , Sodom and Gomorrah