"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."
"... But all the feelings that evoke in us the joy or the misfortune of a real person are only produced in us through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist was in understanding that, in the apparatus of our emotions, since the image is the only essential element, the simplification which consists of purely and simply suppressing the factual characters is a definitive improvement."
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Source: Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.326, Wordsworth Editions
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