"[...] If in this craze for amusement Albertine might be said to echo something of the old original Gilberte, that is because a certain similarity exists, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and wring our heart. They are, these women, a product of our temperament, an image inversely projected, a negative of our sensibility. So that a novelist might, in relating the life of his hero, describe his successive love-affairs in almost exactly similar terms, and thereby give the impression not that he was repeating himself but that he was creating, since an artificial novelty is never so effective as a repetition that manages to reveal a fresh truth."

- Marcel Proust, La recherche du temps perdu, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.