As long as things are possible, we defer them, and they can assume their power of attraction and their apparent ease of accomplishment only when, projected into the ideal void of imagination, they are withdrawn from immersion in the cloying, degrading morass of real life. The idea that we shall die is more cruel than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that someone else is dead, than the idea that, when the waters of reality close after having engulfed a person's being, they smoothly, without so much as a ripple, cover the spot from which that being is excluded, where neither will nor knowledge exist any longer, and from which it is as difficult to return to the idea of what that person's being had experienced as it is difficult, even while memories of their life are still fresh, to think that this person is assimilable to the insubstantial images and memories left by the characters of a novel that we have read.
quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Fugitive" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
pps. 474-5, Penguin Classics, 2003
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