In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)

by Marcel Proust

Moreover she made the mistake which everyone makes who is unduly modest; she rated everything that concerned herself below, and consequently outside, the range of other people’s duties and engagements.

But already there is the same fault, that nonsense of stringing together fine-sounding words and only afterwards troubling about what they mean.

The first was that (at a time when, every day, I regarded myself as standing upon the threshold of a life which was still intact and would not enter upon its course until the following morning) my existence had already begun, and that, furthermore, what was yet to follow would not differ to any extent from what had gone before.

Life is strewn with these miracles for which people who love can always hope.

He went out of his way to discern and to admire in them the qualities that every human being will display if we examine him with a prejudice in his favour and not with the distaste of the nice-minded;

With the cowardice of those who are nevertheless in a position to act as they choose, she did not address a single word to Odette,

Since I was able to enjoy everything that this sonata had to give me only in a succession of hearings, I never possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself. But, less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us the best of themselves.

And we shall love it longer than the rest because we have taken longer to get to love it.

His work no longer appeared to me so inevitable.

Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not in the

intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.

And the same words which had served Bergotte as a superfluous excuse for the excellence of his early works became as it were an ineffective consolation to him for the mediocrity of the last.

Seeing and then losing them all thus increased the state of agitation in which I was living, and I found a certain wisdom in the philosophers who recommend us to set a limit to our desires (if, that is, they refer to our desire for people, for that is the only kind that leads to anxiety, having for its object something unknown but conscious. To suppose that philosophy could be referring to the desire for wealth would be too absurd).

We prefer them to friends whom we have not seen for some time, for they contain more of what we are at present.

In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind. There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul.

devoid of that vague respect which one has for the rights of other people, even if they do not know one’s aunt,

This young man who had the air of a disdainful aristocrat and sportsman had in fact no respect or curiosity except for the things of the mind, and especially those modern manifestations of literature and art which seemed so ridiculous to his aunt; he was imbued, moreover, with what she called “socialistic spoutings,” was filled with the most profound contempt for his caste, and spent long hours in the study of Nietzsche and Proudhon.

These words filled me with a sort of melancholy and I was at a loss for an answer, for I felt when I was with him, when I was talking to him—and no doubt it would have been the same with anyone else—none of that happiness which it was possible for me to experience when I was by myself.

“Oh, well, it’s not of the slightest importance; I shall make some other arrangement”: the other arrangement which it is not of the slightest importance that he should be driven to adopt being sometimes suicide.

Undoubtedly, it is not common sense that is “the commonest thing in the world”; it is human kindness.

When Bloch spoke to me of the attack of snobbery from which I must be suffering, and bade me confess that I was a snob, I might well have replied: “If I were, I shouldn’t be going about with you.”

perfunctory gesture of annoyance by which people mean to show that they have waited long enough, although they never make it when they are really waiting,

she spoke of Saint-Loup’s uncle with that detached, smiling, almost affectionate benevolence with which we reward the object of our disinterested observation for the pleasure that it has given us,

‘To be with the people one loves, to speak to them, not to speak to them, it is all the same.’

Besides, Monsieur, the greatest folly of all is to mock or to condemn in others what one does not happen to feel oneself. I love the night, and you tell me that you dread it.

I try to understand everything and I take care to condemn nothing. In short, you must not be too sorry for yourself;

His mistress had opened his mind to the invisible, had brought an element of seriousness into his life, of delicacy into his heart, but all this escaped his sorrowing family who repeated: “That creature will be the death of him, and meanwhile she’s doing what she can to disgrace him.”

unable to win the admiration of his hall-porter, of the passers-by, of the cabman he hails, he prefers not to be seen by them at all, and with that object abandons every activity that would oblige him to go out of doors.

Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.

I no longer knew the fear of falling ill, the necessity of not dying, the importance of work.

the risk of an impossibility.

“When a mind has a tendency towards day-dreams, it’s a mistake to shield it from them, to ration them. So long as you divert your mind from its day-dreams, it will not know them for what they are;

extremely sensitive to the opinion of others.

have never been able to deny myself the pleasure of showing them that I take more trouble to avert the risk of death from their path than from my own.

I should wear that sort of inquiring expression which betrays not surprise but the wish to look surprised—such bad actors are we all, or such good mind-readers our fellow-men—that I should even go so far as to point a finger to my breast, as who should ask “Are you calling me?” and then run to join him, my head lowered in compliance and docility and my face coldly masking my annoyance at being torn from the study of old pottery in order to be introduced to people whom I had no wish to know.

Our love becomes immense, and we never dream how small a place in it the real woman occupies.

“however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that the picture of what we were at an earlier stage may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life.

But we must not repudiate it, for it is a proof that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studios, of artistic groups—assuming one is a painter—extracted something that transcends them.”

I tried to find beauty there where I had never imagined before that it could exist, in the most ordinary things, in the profundities of “still life.”

If, instead of misfortune, it is happiness, it may be that not until many years have elapsed will we recall that the most important event in our emotional life occurred without our having time to give it any prolonged attention, or even to become aware of it almost, at a social gathering to which we had gone solely in expectation of that event.

For he was one of those people who can never be “doing nothing,” although there was nothing, in fact, that he could ever be said to do.

This was perhaps to some extent due to the bad side of her, to the hardness, the insensitivity of the little band, its rudeness towards everything that was not itself.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

apparent, she was highly intelligent, and that in the things that she said the stupidity was not her own but that of her environment and her age.

for the fact was that in those periods of my life in which I was not actually in love but desired to be, I carried in my mind not only a physical ideal of beauty which, as the reader has seen, I recognised from a distance in every passing woman far enough away from me for her indistinct features not to belie the identification, but also the mental phantom—ever ready to become incarnate—of the woman who was going to fall in love with me, to take up her cues in the amorous comedy which I had had all written out in my mind from my earliest boyhood, and in which every attractive girl seemed to me to be equally desirous of playing, provided that she had also some of the physical qualifications required.

For the sense of boredom which those of us whose law of development is purely internal cannot help but feel in a friend’s company (when, that is to say, we must remain on the surface of ourselves, instead of pursuing our voyage of discovery into the depths)—that first impression of boredom our friendship impels us to correct when we are alone again, to recall with emotion the words which our friend said to us, to look upon them as a valuable addition to our substance, when the fact is that we are not like buildings to which stones can be added from without, but like trees which draw from their own sap the next knot that will appear on their trunks, the spreading roof of their foliage.

I seemed to myself to be cosily preserved from solitude, nobly desirous of sacrificing myself for him, in short incapable of realising myself.

She had also inherited the habit of making one repeat whatever one said to her, so as to appear to be interested, and to be trying to form an opinion of her own.