Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7]: (Book Center) (The Greatest Writers of All Time)

by Marcel Proust

slightly ir...

the critics of each generation confine themselves to maintaining the direct opposite of the truths admitted by their predecessors,

above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom.

thanks to whom she had obtained a thousand things which she wanted but which M. de Guermantes pitilessly denied his wife so long as he was not in love with some one else. And

In love it often happens that gratitude, the desire to give pleasure, makes us generous beyond the limits of what the other person’s expectation and self-interest could have anticipated.

She laughed at them, first with her husband, then with a few chosen friends.

limited

???

those of us who are not professional actors the tedium of living always in the same character

is removed for a moment, as if we were to go on the boards, when another person forms a false idea of us,

As a matter of fact she hated Elstir’s work, but found a unique quality in anything that was in her own house.

did not like to hear people run down anything that her rooms contained.

Here again, Mme. de Guermantes’s mind attracted me just because of what it excluded was exactly the content of my own thoughts)

Only she was incapable of realising what I had sought for in her, the charm of her historic name,

and the tiny quantity of it that I had found in her, a rustic survival from Guermantes.

A misunderstanding so entirely natural, and one that will always exist between a young dreamer like myself and a woman of the world,

If the name, Duchesse de Guermantes, was for me a collective name, it was so not merely in history, by the accumulation of all the women who had successively borne it, but also in the course of my own short life, which had already seen, in this single Duchesse de Guermantes, so many different women superimpose themselves, each one vanishing as soon as the next had acquired sufficient consistency.

name, Duchesse de Guermantes, was for me a collective name,

it was so not merely in history, by the accumulation of all the women who had...

Words do not change their meaning as much in centuries as names do for us in the space of a few years.

Our memory and our heart are not large enough to be able to remain faithful.

We have not room enough, in our mental field, to keep the dead there ...

Saintrailles

given me the impression of flat vulgarity which the view on entering the Danish port of Elsinore would give to any passionate admirer of Hamlet

their names had in a certain measure formed their faces, their intellects and their prejudices, but survived in them only as does the cause in the effect, that is to say as a thing possible for the brain to extract but in no way perceptible to the imagination.

the absurd stories which were being circulated about the charming Hereditary Grand Duke of Luxembourg found as much credence in this drawing-room as they had among Saint-Loup’s friends.

Plainly it was an epidemic that would not last longer than perhaps a year or two but had meanwhile

infected ev...

Turkish Ambassadress,

Retreat of the Ten Thousand

the various forms of onanism,

the word ‘Miller’

title of La Fontaine’s fable.

Turkish Ambassadress breathed in my ear: “You appear to be very much in the Duke’s good books; have a care!” and, on my demanding an explanation: “I mean to say, you understand what I mean, he’s a man to whom one could safely entrust one’s daughter, but not one’s son.”

well born as the Duc de Guermantes or the Duc de La Trémoïlle. They have now fallen into oblivion because, as they left no descendants, their name which we no longer hear sounds like a name unknown;

traveller who, in the heart of Burgundy, stops in the little village of Charlus to look at its church,

will go away ignorant that this name, Charlus, was that of a man who ranked with the highest in the land. This

“Who knows,” I continued to muse, “whether one day Guermantes itself may not appear nothing more than a place-name,

Gilbert the Bad,

the illustriousness of these families gave them in my eyes lay in the fact that one can, starting from to-day, follow their ascending course, step by step, to a point far beyond the fourteenth century, recover the diaries and correspondence of all the forebears of M. de Charlus, of the Prince d’Agrigente, of the Princesse de Parme, in a past

But that is never to happen and this is the strory of that 'not-happening, এক না হওয়ার কাহন। সমগ্র প্রুস্তই।

my historical curiosity was faint in comparison with my aesthetic pleasure.

were only titles,

infinitely more seductive.

The name Guermantes itself received from all the beautiful names—extinct, and so all the more glowingly rekindled—with which I learned only now that it was connected, a new sense and purpose, purely poetical.

At least my departure would permit the other guests, once the profane intruder was no longer among them, to constitute themselves at length into a secret conclave.

in the same way as people talk in middle-class society.

these flower-maidens

garland of orchids

at the front door, a sort of stentorian recital of great names from the History of France.

I knew the formula. The Duke had come the whole way across the drawing-room in order to utter it before me with an obliging, concerned air, as though he were handing me a diploma or offering me a plateful of biscuits.

Their affection does not outlive the exaltation that has dictated it; and