Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary on love:

'She did not speak; he was silent, captivated by her silence, as he would have been by her speech... To him she stood outside those fleshly attributes from which he had nothing to obtain, and in his heart she went on soaring and became farther removed from him after the magnificent manner of an apotheosis this taking wing. It was one of those pure feelings that do not interfere with life, that are cultivated because they are rare, and whose loss would afflict more than their possession rejoices.'