8
" what we love is too much in the past, consists too much in the time that we have spent together for us to require the whole woman; we wish only to be sure that it is she, not to be mistaken as to her identity, a thing far more important than beauty to those who are in love; her cheeks may grow hollow, her body thin, even to those who were originally most proud, in the eyes of the world, of their domination over beauty, that little tip of a nose, that sign in which is summed up the permanent personality of a woman, that algebraical formula, that constant, is sufficient to prevent a man who is courted in the highest society and is in love with her from being free upon a single evening because he is spending his evenings in brushing and entangling, until it is time to go to bed, the hair of the woman whom he loves, or simply in staying by her side, so that he may be with her or she with him, or merely that she may not be with other people. "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva
9
" The links between another person and ourselves exist only in our minds. Memory weakens them as it fades, and despite the illusions which we hope will deceive us and with which, whether from love, friendship, politeness, human respect or from duty, we hope to deceive others, we exist on our own. Man is a being who cannot move beyond his own boundaries, who knows others only within himself, and if he alleges the contrary, he is lying. "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva
16
" If I had thought aloud, I would have repeated it endlessly, and my verbiage would have been as monotonous and limited as if I had been transformed into a bird, like the one in the legend whose call repeats endlessly the name of the woman that he loved when he was a man. You say it to yourself, but as you do not say it out loud, it seems as if you are writing it inside yourself, and it leaves its trace in the brain, which must finally, like a wall on which someone has enjoyed scribbling, be entirely covered by the name of the beloved, rewritten a thousand times. We write it over and over again in our minds as long as we are happy, even more when we are unhappy. "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva
18
" 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
19
" Now perhaps this fury against me, which had abated as soon as she saw how sad I was, was only a relapse. Indeed, even those people whom, her eyes sparkling with rage, she had threatened with disgrace, death and imprisonment, using false witness if need be, as soon as she thought they were unhappy and humiliated, she wished them no ill and was ready to shower them with favors. For she was not basically wicked and if, below the surface, her slightly deeper, rather surprising nature did not confirm the kindness that her first delicate attentions had led people to suppose but rather envy and pride, yet, at an even deeper level, her third-degree, that is, her true nature, even if never quite fully realized, tended toward goodness and love of her neighbor. Only, like all people who live in a state which they wish were better, but know no more of this than their desire for it and do not understand that the first condition is to break with their present state—like neurasthenics or morphine addicts who would like to be cured but only as long as no one deprives them of their tics or their morphine, like certain rather worldly religious souls or artistic minds, aspiring to solitude yet prepared to imagine it only in so far as it does not imply absolutely renouncing their former life—Andrée was ready to love all God’s creatures but only as long as she had first managed to see them failing to triumph and, in order to do so, had humiliated them in advance. She did not understand that one should love even the proud and conquer their pride through love rather than more overweening pride. But the fact is that she was like those invalids who want to be cured by the same much-loved means as sustain their illness and which they would immediately cease to love if they abandoned these means. But one may learn to swim and still prefer to keep one’s feet dry. "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva
