Igor

“Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chooses the person one loves after endless deliberation and on the strength of diverse qualities and advantages.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

“In spite of myself, still pursued in my jealousy by the memory of Saint-Loup’s relations with “Rachel when of the Lord” and of those of Swann with Odette, I was too given to believing that the moment I was in love I could not be loved, and that self-interest alone could attach a woman to me. It was no doubt foolish to judge Albertine in terms of Odette and Rachel. But it was not her, it was me; it was the sentiments I might inspire that my jealousy caused me to underestimate. And of this—perhaps erroneous—judgment were no doubt born many of the misfortunes that would befall us.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

“A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.”
― Marcel Proust, The Captive

“Into the snows she sweeps,
Hurling the haven behind,
The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps,
For the infinite air is unkind,
And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow,
Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;
Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivelled snow
Spins to the wido-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

(from "The Wreck of the Deutschland, Part the Second")”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose