61
" certainly this heartache, perhaps somewhat calculated—so little do we care for the pain of others—by a woman desiring to make us miss her as acutely as possible, whether the woman only pretending to make her departure wishes merely to obtain more favorable conditions, or whether leaving for ever—for ever!—she wants to strike a blow, perhaps from vengeance, perhaps to continue to be loved, or perhaps to preserve the quality of the memory that she will leave, and violently break out of this network of tedium and indifference which she had felt being woven around her,—certainly we had promised each other that we would avoid such heartache, we had said that we would part on good terms. But it is in fact very rare to part on good terms, for if all were well we would not separate. And then again, the woman toward whom we affect the utmost indifference does none the less feel obscurely that, just as we have come to tire of her because of the force of habit, so we have become all the more attached to her, and she guesses that one of the essential requirements for parting on good terms is to warn her partner that she is going to leave. Yet she fears that warning him may prevent her. Every woman feels that, the greater is her power over a man, the more her only way of leaving him is just to take flight. She becomes a fugitive precisely because she was a queen, this is inevitable. "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva
64
" On the other hand, what I myself called “thinking of Albertine” was in fact thinking of ways of getting her to return, of meeting up with her, of finding out what she was doing. So that if, during these hours of unremitting torture, my suffering could have been displayed in graphic form, it would have shown images of the Orsay railway station,16 the banknotes offered to Mme Bontemps, Saint-Loup leaning over a post-office counter filling in a form to send me a telegram, but never a picture of Albertine. In the same way that during the course of our lives we, in our egoism, constantly see before our eyes the goals which our selves find valuable, but do not perceive the “I” itself which never ceases to scrutinize them, so the desire that directs our actions swoops down upon them, but never looks back on itself, either because it is too utilitarian and, spurning knowledge, prefers to rush into action, or because we search out the future in order to compensate for the disappointments of the present, or even because the indolence of the mind tempts it to slide down the slippery slope of the imagination rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva
68
" Although Albertine existed in my memory only in the states in which she had appeared successively during her life, that is, subdivided into a series of temporal fractions, my thoughts, restoring her unity, reconstituted her as a person, and it is on this person that I wanted to form an overall judgment, to know whether she had lied, whether she had loved women, and whether it was in order to be free to frequent them that she had left me. "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva
70
" Bir başka insanla ilişkilerimizde en önemli hata kaynakları, iyi kalpli olmak ve o insanı sevmektir. Bir tebessüm, bir bakış, bir omuz yüzünden aşık oluruz. Bu kadarı yeterlidir; sonra, umut veya hüzün dolu uzun saatler boyunca bir insan imal eder, bir kişilik yaratırız. Ve ardından, aşık olduğumuz kişiyle görüştüğümüzde, karşımıza ne kadar acımasız gerçekler çıkarsa çıksın, o bakışın, o omuzun sahibinden bu iyi yürekli mizacı, bizi seven kadın kişiliğini bir türlü ayıramayız. "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva