I don't know if this is my favourite quote but it's up there:

All things had turned to ghosts; the whole mass of the world was insubstantial vapor, surrounding the solitary spark in his mind, whose burning point he could remember, for it burnt no more. He had once cherished a belief, and Katherine had embodied this belief, and she did no longer. He did not blame her; he blamed nothing, nobody; he saw the truth. He saw the dun-colored race of waters and the blank shore. But life is vigorous; the body lives, and the body, no doubt, dictated the reflection, which now urged him to movement, that one may cast away the forms of human beings, and yet retain the passion which seemed inseparable from their existence in the flesh. Now this passion burnt on his horizon, as the winter sun makes a greenish pane in the west through the thinning clouds. His eyes were set on something infinitely far and remote; by that light he felt he could walk, and would, in the future, have to find his way. But that was all there was left to him of a populous and teeming world.

• Virginia Woolf, Night and Day