" And once more I felt above all that memory is not creative, that it is incapable of desiring anything different or even anything better than what we have already possessed; and then that it is mental, so that reality cannot provide it with the state to which it aspires; and finally that the rebirth which it incarnates, since it emanates from a dead person, is less the rebirth of the need for love, as it would have us believe, than that of the need for the missing person. So that even the resemblance to Albertine of the woman whom I had chosen, and the resemblance of her affections, if I managed to obtain them, to those of Albertine, only made me feel all the more the absence of what I had been looking for without realizing it, of what was indispensable for the rebirth of my love, that is Albertine herself, the period that we had lived together, the past which I was seeking without realizing it. "

― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva