... daily habits existed whose origins we ourselves had forgotten ...

As some need the scent of a forest or the sound of the lapping waters of a lake, I needed to feel her sleeping beside me at night and, during the day, to have her always beside me in the car. For even if we forget a love affair, it may determine the form of the love affair that follows. Already in the very heart of the earlier love affair daily habits existed whose origins we ourselves had forgotten; it was the anguish we first felt one day which made us desperately desire, then systematically repeat like rituals whose original meaning is forgiven, our beloved all the way back to her door, to move her into our home, to attend in person or through the presence of a trusted friend all her comings and goings - all these habits are smooth highways where every day our love follows paths which in former times were scored out by the molten lava of our ardent emotions. But these habits survive the disappearance of the woman concerned, even her memory. They shape, if not all our love affairs, at least certain of our loves, as they recur in turn.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Fugitive" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
pps. 641-2, Penguin Classics, 2003