I needed her to notice me. She did not notice me, so I hailed her. Her tall person was topped by a face with a complexion so golden-pink that I seemed to be seeing her through the radiance of a stained-glass window. She turned and walked back toward me: I could not look away from her face, which, as it neared and grew larger, was like a sun that did not dazzle the stare, no matter how close it came, which you could look straight at as it deluged you with its blaze of glorious golds and reds. Her eye, which had a piercing gaze, met mine; but just then, as the guard and stationmaster were shutting the doors, the train started to move. In broad daylight now, I watched as she walked away from the station and along her footpath: I was traveling away from the dawn. Whether my excitement had been caused by the girl, or whether it had been the cause of much of the enjoyment afforded me by the nearness of her, she was so much a part of my feeling that my desire to see her again was above all the longing to retain something of that excitement, not to let it die, not to be severed forever from the one who, though she was unaware of this, had been part of it. It was not just that this feeling was pleasant. It was especially because (as the tightening of a string or the more rapid vibration of a nerve produces a different note or color) it gave a sharper tone to what I saw, gave me a part to act in an unknown and infinitely more interesting world; and for as long as the gathering speed of the train allowed me to see the beautiful milkmaid, she was like a part of some other life, separated from the one I knew by a narrow borderline, another life, in which the feelings transmitted to me by things were not the usual ones, and the leaving of which felt like a sort of inner death.

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2
Marcel Proust