“…When, later, I had occasion to meet, in the course of my life, in convents for instance, truly saintly embodiments of practical charity, they generally had the cheerful, positive, indifferent, and brusque air of a busy surgeon, the sort of face in which one can read no commiseration, no pity in the face of human suffering, no fear of offending it, the sort which is the ungentle face, the antipathetic and sublime face of true goodness.”
- Marcel Proust,
Combray