Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

He filled himself up with God knows what, but he could not deny, in the
small hours of his insomniac nights, that he was full of something that had
never been used, that he did not know how to begin to use, that is, love.
In his dreams he was so tormented by women of unbearable sweetness and
beauty, so he preferred to stay awake and force himself to rehearse some
part of his general knowledge in order to blot out the tragic feeling of
being endowed with larger-than-usual capacity for love, without a single
person on earth to offer it to.