" such suffering, owed to her, in compensation, the possibility of receiving the strange call which had come to me and which I would never again cease to hear—as it were the promise that something else existed, something perhaps reachable through art, besides the nothingness that I had found in all pleasures, and even in love, and that even if my life seemed so empty, at least it was not over. "

― Marcel Proust , La Prisonnière