Here are three Marcel Proust quotes from ‘In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.’ (In order to make his words even more relevant and believable, I have changed the gender where appropriate.)
‘It is only because we have forgotten that we can now and then return to the person we once were, envisage things as that person did, be hurt again, because we are not ourselves anymore, but someone else, who once loved something we no longer care about.’
‘How preferable the malleable memory of him seems: instead of the real meeting with him, in your solitude you can dramatize a dream in which the boy who is not in love with you assures you that he is! This memory, which can become as sweet as possible, by being gradually flavored with what you most desire, is far better than the future encounter with a person whose words will be put into his mouth not by you, but by his foreseeable indifference and even his unforeseeable animosity. To be no longer in love is to know that forgetting — or even a fading memory — causes much less pain than the unhappiness of loving.’
‘If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.’
