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

by Marcel Proust

and their imagination end by making them take for real men the inverts to whom they had prostituted themselves.

like that of the poet

Oscar Wilde

like Samson and saying like him: “The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”;

without reflecting that there were no abnormals when homosexuality was the norm,

no anti-Christians before Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be accompanied by exalted moral qualities) than certain other vices which exclude those qualities,

vices better understood and so more readily excused by the...

in the unconscious mass of this male body in which she is imprisoned,

every creature follows the line of his own pleasure, and if this creature is not too vicious he will seek it in a sex complementary to his own.

And for the invert vice begins, not when he forms relations (for there are all sorts of reasons that may enjoin these), but when he takes his pleasure with women.

But the second sort seek out those women who love other women;

who can procure for them a young man,

One of the reasons which enhance still farther the masculine air of women like Mme. de

Vaugoubert is that the neglect which they receive from their husbands, the shame that they feel at such neglect, destroy in them by degrees everything that is womanly.

Parties of this sort are as a rule premature. They have little reality until the following day, when they occupy the attention of the people who were not invited.

When the electric light in our drawing-room fails, and we are obliged to replace it with oil lamps, everything seems altered. I

In that great game of hide and seek which is played in our memory when we seek to recapture a name, there is not any series of gradual approximations.

if there are transitions between oblivion and memory, then, these transitions are unconscious.

A man who, night after night, falls like a lump of lead upon his bed, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will such a man ever dream of making, I do not say great discoveries, but even minute observations upon sleep? He barely knows that he does sleep.

A memory without fault is not a very powerful incentive to studying the phenomena of memory.

if I were a man,”

“I would give my life for that heavenly creature.” I

made me find her tolerable.

Why?

I felt that I need not stop to consider this change of front: the invitation to the party this evening had brought it about.

In the ordinary course of life, the eyes of the Duchesse de Guermantes were absent and slightly melancholy, she made them sparkle with a flame of wit only when she had to say how-d’ye-do to a friend;

as she had too many greetings to bestow, she decided that it would be tiring to have to switch off the light after each. Just

her eyes, just as much as her other jewels, were sparkling.

to be loved, admired, but not to be believed;

to suppose it to be genuine, a sign of ill-breeding.

Had I written a masterpiece, the Guermantes would have given me less credit for it than I earned by that bow.

The invert believes

himself to be the only one of his kind in the universe; it is only in later years that he imagines—another exaggeration—that the unique exception is the normal man.

each of our senses loses its strength and vivacity, becomes atrophied when it is no longer exercised,

the Minister Plenipotentiary was no longer capable of identifying those who, beneath the disguise of their uniform, were at heart his congeners.

Racine’s tragedies inform Athalie and Abner that Joas is of the House of David, that Esther, enthroned in the

People in society are too apt to think of a book as a sort of cube one side of which has been removed, so that the author can at once ‘put in’ the people he meets.

Mme. Timoléon d’Amoncourt.

Monaldeschi

like two swallows that have not migrated in time. And

Prince had refused to have Swann in the house,