Alain de Botton

“It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

The Tree of Possibilities - we see life this way for a brief time only

"Your heels on the sidewalk make me think of the roads I never traveled, that stretch away like the boughs of a tree. You have reawakened the obsession of my early youth: I would imagine life before me like a tree. I used to call it the tree of possibilities. We see life like that way for only a brief time. Thereafter, it comes to look like a track laid out once and for all, a tunnel one can never get out of. Still, the old spectre of the tree stays with us in the form of an ineradicable nostalgia. You have made me remember that tree, and in return, I want to pass you it’s image, have you hear its enthralling murmur.” - Milan Kundera, Identity