With death in his heart he said to himself, "Yes, I was right in declaring that the only women you can continue to love are those you lose.
"To learn, three years later, when the woman is inaccessible, chaste and married, dead, perhaps, or out of France--to learn that she loved you, though you had not dared believe it while she was near you, ah, that's the dream! These real and intangible loves, these loves made up of melancholy and distant regrets, are the only ones that count.

Because there is no flesh in them, no earthly leaven.
"To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it.

A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return.

As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable.

Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life.".