Marcel Proust

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

Love is a reciprocal torture.

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.