Ballad of the Sad Cafe

"There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love that has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do, he must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world--a world intense and strange, complete in himself."

"The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" by Carson McCullers (1943)