"The lover's solitude is not a solitude of person (love confides, speaks, tells itself), it is a solitude of system: I am alone in making a system out of it (perhaps because I am ceaselessly flung back on the solipsism of my discourse). A difficult paradox: I can be understood by everyone (love comes from books, its dialect is a common one), but I can be heard (received 'prophetically') only by subjects who have exactly and right now the same language I have."

– Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard