The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.

For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one no longer is.

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.

The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.

How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory.