“Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it. Loneliness is the crucible of love. It’s the proof that the groom, the friend, the mystic pass at different levels. It is not sterile folding, but realization of the constant novelty of desire: desire of the other, desire to open to the other that part of ourselves that escapes our own gaze, to this other one that is more intimate than ourselves. It is loyalty to the unique desire whose realization is only possible in the invincible hope that constitutes its strength and which, of begging, leads us to the invisible heart of the world.”

Simone Weil