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

by Marcel Proust

like a dog that chases along the ground the dancing shadow of an insect in the air—misled by her appearance in the body as we are apt to be in this world where we have no direct perception of people’s souls,

the sun was already installed upon the roof, like a slater who is up betimes, and starts early and works quietly so as not to rouse the sleeping town, whose stillness seems to enhance his activity.

a gaze which, could I have broken up its prism, analysed

Mme. de Cambremer look like some provincial schoolgirl,

a panorama which deaths, scandals, illnesses, quarrels would soon alter,

generated by the same desire to be sociable drew her attention back to her own attire,

But what the Duchesse and Princesse de Guermantes might think, an opinion which would have furnished me with an invaluable clue to the nature of these two poetic

creatures,

imagined with the aid of t...

for I had the happy sense that my own personality had been dissolved in theirs,

for me there was no one in the world but herself out walking—a whole poem of elegant refinement and the finest

ornament, the most curious flower of the season.

caught sight of a schoolgirl

my hand pressed to my heart which was already leaping towards an unexplored form of life;

each one of whom aroused a sensual longing which she alone appeared capable of assuaging.

Egyptian deity?

This alteration in Françoise’s character was perhaps inevitable.

The life led by our servants is probably of an even more monstrous abnormality, which only its familiarity can prevent us from seeing.

We had always laughed, my mother and I, at Mme. Sazerat, who used, in speaking of her servants, expressions like ‘the lower orders’ or ‘the servant class.’

that I was not worth the price of a rope to hang me, and

all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we think ourselves to be directly perceiving; that the trees, the sun and the sky would not be the same as what we see if they were apprehended by creatures having eyes differently constituted from ours, or, better still, endowed for that purpose with organs other than eyes which would furnish trees and sky and sun with equivalents, though not visual. However

Was it the same with all one’s social relations? And

courage to refrain,

when I spoke to her as master to servant. She knew that this was not natural to me,

sleep in my

own bed.

This tick changed its place every moment, for I could not see the watch; it seemed to come from behind, from in front of me, from my right, from my left, sometimes to die away as though at a great distance. Suddenly I caught sight of the watch on the table. Then I heard the tick in a fixed place from which it did not move again.

Concept Of space and conciousness as the space is known source of sound sounded fixed

We play games of patience with cards which we do not hear, until we imagine that we have not touched them, that they are moving of their own accord, and, anticipating our desire to play with them, have begun to play with us.

objective to capture not the ‘other person’ with whom we are in love but our capacity for suffering at that person’s hands.

the loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition,

Oliver Sacks

objects moved without sound seemed to be being moved also without cause; deprived of

community called a barracks where, time having taken the form of action,

imperfection of memory);

in the one which I usually occupied I was not present, my mind remained elsewhere, and in its place sent only the sense of familiarity.

menial ghosts of the past who had been granted the privilege of staying,

an assembly of rooms as real as a colony of people, living,

Before

As if before alowing us into the cre of his work Proust set the context in 1st 3 volumes.

while undressing we should have dozed off unconsciously upon the bed,

one cannot properly describe human life unless one shews it soaked in the sleep in which it plunges, which, night after night, sweeps round it as a promontory is encircled by the sea—the intervening layer of sleep was strong enough to bear the shock of the music and I heard nothing.

For often, when I was still asleep at the moment when, on the contrary, I had supposed that the noise would awaken me, for the next hour I imagined that I was awake, while still drowsing,

various scenes of which it deprived me but at which I had the illusion of looking on.

What one has meant to do duri...

one accomplishes only in on...

people who have difficulty in going to sleep seek first of all to escape from the waking world.

After

At the beginning os Swan's way we saw him sleepless

when we reach the cave in which ‘auto-suggestions’ prepare—like witches—the hell-broth of imaginary maladies or of the recurrence of nervous disorders, and watch for the hour at which the storm that has been gathering during our unconscious sleep will break with sufficient force to make sleep cease.

kinds of sleep, so different one from another,

On the dim walls of that chamber which opens upon our dreams, within which toils without ceasing that oblivion of the sorrows of love whose task, interrupted and brought to nought at times by a nightmare big with reminiscence, is ever

speedily resumed, hang,

even