Love...., ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.

An hour or so later he received a note from Odette. Swann had left his cigarette case at her house. "If only," she wrote, "you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have it back.

She was "a woman of uncertain age.

How can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we make a movement to preserve ourselves from death, in a world where love is provoked by a lie and consists solely in the need of having our sufferings appeased by whatever being has made us suffer?

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion