41
" 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
47
" Suffering, as the aftermath of an unwelcome moral shock, aspires to change form: we hope to dispel it by making plans, by seeking information; we want it to pass through its countless metamorphoses, for this requires less courage than keeping the suffering raw; we lie with our suffering as in a bed too narrow, too hard, and too cold. So I stood up again; I made my way around the room, but with infinite caution, I took up positions where I would not catch sight of Albertine’s chair, "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva
51
" And the more completely our desires have been realized and the longer the happiness has been prolonged, against the laws of nature, and has been consecrated by habit, the stronger the sorrow, the more impossible to bear. In another sense too, the two tendencies, in this case the one which made me want my letter to be sent and, when I thought that it had been, to regret this, are both true in their way. "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva