New Eyes Same Old Sighs

We design our life for the sake of an individual who, by the time we are able to welcome her into it, has turned into a total stranger, and never comes to share that life with us; and so we live on, imprisoned in an arrangement made for someone else.

— Marcel Proust, “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” (via now-its-dark)

Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.

— John Keats (via fleurstains)

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them fades; it is because we ourselves are dying.

— In Search of Lost Time, The Fugitive by Marcel Proust.

I know of no greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, without end.

— Franz Kafka (via littlemiss)

whereas three-quaters of the human race flatter the living and pay no attention to the dead, she often did after their deaths what those whom she treated badly would have wished her to do while they where alive.

— In Search of Lost Time, The Fugitive by Marcel Proust.

stage productions with several characters, which however have no future.

— In Search of Lost Time, The Fugitive by Marcel Proust.

I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.

— Albert Camus (via heyjanelane)

Perhaps the only goal on earth toward which mankind is striving lies in the process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained.

—

Fyodor Dostoevsky

(via notyourmanicpixiegirl)

the process of forgetting is no more regular than that of love

— In Search of Lost Time, The Fugitive Marcel Proust.