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[…] I told myself that however much I’d loved her, however unique she was, she was inextricably bound up with the situation in which we met and fell in love. It seemed to me an error in reasoning for a man to isolate a woman he loves from all the circumstances in which he met her and in which she lives, to try, with dogged inner concentration, to purify her of everything that is not her self, which is to say also of the story that they lived through together and that gives their love its shape.
After all, what I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as a character in our common love story.[…]
Milan Kundera – The Joke, 1967. Translation by Aaron Asher, Faber and Faber, London 1992.
[…] Quand on aime, l’amour est trop grand pour pouvoir être contenu tout entier en nous ; il irradie vers la personne aimée, rencontre en elle une surface qui l’arrête, le force à revenir vers son point de départ et c’est ce choc en retour de notre propre tendresse que nous appelons les sentiments de l’autre et qui nous charme plus qu’à l’aller, parce que nous ne reconnaissons pas qu’elle vient de nous. […]
Marcel Proust – À la recherche du temps perdu, II, 1919 (via Frenf.it).