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

by Marcel Proust

unlooked-for wealth of illustration that memory supplies, is intermittence),

The culminating point of her day is not the moment in which she dresses herself for all the world to see, but that in which she undresses herself for a man.

certain favourite parts are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.

isn’t what one’s glad to do; it’s what one is able to do! I

Mme. Verdurin was a drawing-room in herself.

can talk of nothing but their frocks…. Listen to this, my friend; not more than

One of the effects of this indulgence is to aggravate the tendency which after a certain age we have towards finding pleasure in speeches that are a homage to our own turn of mind,

that is the age at which a great artist prefers to the company of original minds that of pupils who have nothing in common with him save the letter of his doctrine, who listen to him and offer incense; at which a man or woman of mark, who is living entirely for love,

will find that the most intelligent person in a gathering is one perhaps of no distinction, but one who has shewn by some u...

what is meant by an existence devoted to gallantry, and has thus pleasantly excited the voluptuous insti...

It’s very tempting, but more in a friend’s house than at home.

Were they to be found, then, situated not upon that beaten track of hours which leads one always to the moment of departure, but rather upon some cross-road unknown to me along

no doubt, is everything that marks a date and an anniversary when we are unhappy.

The soldier is convinced that a certain interval of time, capable of being indefinitely prolonged, will be allowed him before the bullet finds him,

That is the amulet which preserves people—and

one attributes to her a series of thoughts (though their sum-total be indifference)

When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within us. It radiates towards the beloved object, finds in her a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this shock of the repercussion of our own affection which we call the other’s regard for ourselves, and which pleases us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves. New

hope exhausted before I had had time to shelter myself

behind another,

the most cruel thing about it was that I myself was its architect, unconscious, wilful, merciless and patient.

a slow and painful suicide of that part of me

we are always detached from our fellow-creatures; when a man loves one of them he feels that his love is not labelled with their two names, but may be born again in the future, may have been born already in the past for another and not for her. And in the time when he is not in love, if he

????? Could not follow

We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind that are listening.

The truth which one puts into one’s words does not make a direct path for itself, is not supported by irresistible evidence. A considerable time must elapse before a truth of the same order can take shape in the words themselves. Then

Again he is telling us about art, the concept of art that is the soul of this work

in love the barriers, do what one may, cannot be broken down from without by him whom they maddeningly exclude; it is when he is no longer concerned with them that suddenly, as the result of aft effort directed from elsewhere, accomplished within the heart of her who did not love him, those barriers which he has charged without success will fall to no advantage.

sought only to carve out the easiest channel for the torrent of my tears.

like desire, regret seeks not to be analysed but to be satisfied. When one begins to love, one spends one’s time, not in getting

to know what one’s love really is, but in making it possible to meet next day. When one abandons love one seeks not to know one’s grief but to offer to her who is causing it that ex...

I tasted the sweets of sacrificing the happiness of being with her to the probability of

seeming attractive to her one day, a day when, alas, my seeming attractive to her would be immaterial to me.

had in the old days in the Rue La Pérouse, for instance her animals carved in precious stones, her fetishes.

the hobby of writing was beginning to become common among women who liked to ‘do something,’

Not that the clear perception of certain weaknesses in those whom we love in any way diminishes our affection for them; rather that affection makes us find those weaknesses charming.

elsewhere—at the Verdurins’, for instance—she was reckoned a fool.

a more Botticellian charm.

what might perhaps to an artist express her ‘character’ but in her woman’s eyes were merely blemishes,

“Mme. Swann is quite a period in herself, isn’t she?”

however much one may love the poison that is destroying one, when one has compulsorily to do without it,

it for some time past, one cannot help attaching a certain value to the peace of mind which one had ceased to know, to the absence of emotion and suffering.

how much less painful are those daily recurring dreams of a meeting immediate and incessantly postponed than would be an interview which might be followed by a spasm of jealousy,

one would have to deal with a creature to whom one could no longer dictate at one’s pleasure the words that one would like to hear on her lips,

when we no longer love, that forgetfulness, that even a vague memory do not cause us so much suffering as an ill-starred love.

a single action may have two contradictory effects,

If we succeed in overcoming the force of circumstances, nature at once shifts the battle-ground, placing it within ourselves, and effects a gradual change in our heart until it desires something other than what it is going to obtain.

it is a final incapacity, the mental incapacity for happiness, that nature creates in us. The phenomenon, of happiness either fails to appear, or at once gives way to the bitterest of reactions.

With each injury that she does us, she encircles us more and more completely, doubles our chains—but

love is not like war; after the battle is ended we renew the fight with keener ardour, which we never cease to intensify the more thoroughly we are defeated, provided always that we are still in a position to give battle. This

This

** 10/2/2021-*

renewed assaults of memory,

other side, imagination.