"We are, when we love, in an abnormal state,
capable of giving at once to the most apparently simple accident,
an accident which might at any moment occur,
a seriousness which in itself it would not entail.
What makes us so happy is the presence in our hearts
of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain
and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced.
In reality there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralizes,
makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become,
what it long since would have been had we not obtained what we wanted,
sheer agony."