This idea of death established itself permanently within me

This idea of death established itself permanently within me, in the way that love does. Not that I was in love with death, I hated it. But after having contemplated it from time to time, as one does a woman with whom one is not yet in love, the thought of it adhered to the deepest stratum of my brain so completely that I could not think about anything without its first passing through the idea of death, and even if I was doing nothing, remaining in a state of complete repose, the idea of death kept me company as ceaselessly as the idea of my self. I do not think that, on the day when I became half-dead, it was the accidents which characterized that state, the incapacity to descend a staircase, to recall a name, to get up, that had even unconsciously caused this idea of death, the idea that I was already practically dead, so much as that they had both come together and the great mirror of the mind had inevitably reflected a new reality.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"Finding Time Again" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 6)
p. 352, Penguin Classics, 2003