From the Bookshelf of 2017: Our Year of Reading Proust…

"It was only a [book], but sighing deeply, he let his thoughts feed on it, and his face was wet with a stream of tears." —Reworking of Virgil, Aeneid, 1.464-465

"It was only a [book], but sighing deeply, he let his thoughts feed on it, and his face was wet with a stream of tears." —Reworking of Virgil, Aeneid, 1.464-465

"Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated—the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived—is literature, and life thus defined is in a sense all the time immanent in ordinary men no less than in the artist. But most men do not see it because they do not seek to shed light upon it. And therefore their past is like a photographic dark—room encumbered with innumerable negatives which remain useless because the intellect has not developed them."

"So you definitely don't believe in any kind of a life after death?"
"I think people live on through the people they love and the things they do with their lives . . . if they manage to do things with their lives."
"But that's it, that's it? That's all there is, there's nothing more, there's nothing like bigger?"
"Just energy."
"But there's no plan, no—"
"No, there's definitely no plan. Just survival . . ."
"How can you live like that? I mean, what if you found out you were gonna die tomorrow?"
"I've been prepared to die tomorrow since I was - years old."
"Really?"
"Yeah, pretty much"
"Well, why since you were -?"
"Because I read a report on the effect nuclear war would have on the world, and it was pretty clear to me at that point that this was definitely gonna happen."
"When you were -?"
"And I wake up every day pretty much surprised that, um . . . everything is still here."
"Well, I don't understand how you can live like that."
"Well, I thought we all did."

"The idea of Time was of value to me for yet another reason: it was a spur, it told me that it was time to begin."

". . . Since literature, if I was to trust the evidence of these books, had no very profound truths to reveal: and at the same time it seemed to me sad that literature was not what I had thought it to be."

SWANN'S WAY
Overture
Combray
Swann in Love
Place-Names: The Name

"For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly, that I had not even time to say to myself: "I'm falling asleep."'

". . . days which had suddenly illuminated for me not only the old groping movements of my thought, but even the whole purpose of my life and perhaps of art itself."

"In this perfume . . . in this perfume of a changed sky and tillage and world there was all the diverse melancholy of regret and absence and youth."

"She told me that with you one saw things one would never see otherwise, things that no one had ever thought of mentioning before, that you showed her things she'd never dreamed of, and that even in the well known things she was able to appreciate details which without you she might have passed a dozen times without ever noticing."

"The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself."

"The only thing is, I'm supposed to be going for a ride on my bike this afternoon. You see, Sunday's the only day we've got."

"But won't you catch cold, going bare-headed like that?

"Oh, I shan't be bare-headed, I'll have my cap, and I could get on without it with all the hair I have."

. . . with all the hair I have."

I raised my eyes to those flavescent, frizzy locks and felt myself caught in their swirl and swept away, with a throbbing heart, amid the lightning and the blasts of a hurricane of beauty.

"As we recall certain days in the summer which we found too hot while they lasted, and from which only after they have passed do we extract their unalloyed essence of pure gold and indestructible azure."

"The author of remarkable works of art which were constantly in my thoughts."

"I felt myself enhanced by this work which I bore within me as by something fragile and precious which had been entrusted to me."

". . . teaches us to take a more exalted view of the value of life, a value at the time we did not know how to appreciate and of whose magnitude we have only become aware through the book."

"You have opened up a world of ideas to me which I never suspected, and whatever I may have become I owe entirely to you."

"the power to make me rediscover days that were long past, the Time that was lost."

". . . was ready to believe that the supreme truth of life resides in art."