Proust

“It was only at that moment, more than a year after her burial, because of that anachronism, which so often prevents the calendar of facts from corresponding to the calendar of feelings, that I became conscious that she was dead.”

“So, too, the truth in politics, when one goes to well-informed men and imagines that one is about to grasp it, eludes one.”

“Thus it can be only after one has recognized, not without having had to feel one’s way, the optical illusions of one’s first impression that one can arrive at an exact knowledge of another person, supposing such knowledge to be ever possible.”