We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

More from "The Captive," vol. 10, pt. 2, ch. 3, Remembrance of Things Past (1923), trans. by Ronald and Colette Cortie (1988).

• A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
• Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
• In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.
• Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
• No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.
• People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.