In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europehas endured profound rearrangements and is perhaps on the brink of enduring yet others, where so many threatening and new problems appear everywhere, you will admit it may be demanded of a writer that he be more than a fine wit who makes us forget in idle and byzantine discussions on the merits of pure form.
Marcel ProustWe are less justified in saying that the thinking life of humanity is a miraculous perfectioning of animal and physical life than that it is an imperfection in the organization of spiritual life as rudimentary as the communal existence of protozoa in colonies.
Marcel Proust... in love, barriers cannot be destroyed from the outside by the one to whom the cause despair, no matter what he does; and it isonly when he is no longer concerned with them that, suddenly, as a result of work coming from elsewhere, accomplished within the one who did not love him, these barriers, formerly attacked without success, fall futilely.
Marcel Proust