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

by Marcel Proust

the story of the man who believed that he had the Princess of China shut up in a bottle.

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But as soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid.

There are maladies which we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from oth...

days of Balzac’s novels, when women had an influence on Politics.

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognise that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

to believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not greater folly still, for

We shook the thermometer well, to erase the ominous line, as though we were able thus to reduce the patient’s fever simultaneously with the figure shewn on the scale.

ideas transform themselves in us, they overcome the resistance with which we at first meet them, and feed upon rich intellectual reserves which we did not know to have been prepared for them.

We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in sleeplessness, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthma, epilepsy a terror of death which is worse than any of these,

relishing my grief, now that I knew that it had departed from my life, as we like to exalt ourselves by forming virtuous plans which circumstances do not permit us to put into execution.

She smiled at me sorrowfully and gripped my hand. She had realised that there was no need to hide from me what I had at once guessed, that she had had a slight stroke.

She, in whose heart I always placed myself when I had to form an opinion of the most unimportant person, she was now closed to me, had become part of the world outside, and, more than from any casual passerby, I was obliged to keep from her what I thought of her condition, to say no word of my uneasiness.

She had suddenly handed back to me the thoughts, the griefs which, from the days of my infancy, I had entrusted for all time to her keeping. She was not yet dead. I

for whom they would no longer have any meaning, from that nullity, incapable of conceiving them, which my grandmother would shortly be.

it never occurs to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned, or may signify that death—or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again—may

you hope that it will be as fine again to-morrow; and you have no suspicion that death, which has been making its way towards you along another plane, shrouded in an impenetrable darkness, has chosen precisely this day of all days to make its appearance,

death thus assumes a known, familiar guise of everyday life.

when the abyss of sickness and death opens within us and we have no longer any resistance to offer to the tumult with which the world and our own body rush upon us, then to endure even the tension of our own muscles,

A woman sees herself dying, in these cases not at the actual moment of death but months, sometimes years before, when death has hideously come to dwell in her.

busy as he was, his bombastic manner changed, such is the force of habit; for his habit was to be friendly, that is to say lively with his patients.

I stood on the landing gazing at a grandmother for whom there was not the slightest hope. Each of us is indeed alone.

for many years she had been holding herself quietly in readiness for an uncalendared but final day.

in her devotion she would not admit that her mother was seriously ill,

but never once did she raise her eyes, nor look at the sufferer’s face.

to preserve intact in her memory the image of the true face of my grandmother, radiant with wisdom

goodness.

unfeeling coarseness of the peasant who begins by tearing the wings off dragon-flies until she is allowed to wring the necks of chickens,

the list of those false promises which we swear but are unable to fulfil: “Mamma, you will soon be quite well again, your daughter will see to that.”

In a war, the man who does not love his country says nothing against it, but regards it as lost, commiserates it, sees everything in the darkest colours.

the progress of his works towards Renown. A dead writer can at least be illustrious without any strain on himself.

like daughters whom one loves but whose impetuous youthfulness

and noisy pleasures tire one,

I felt nevertheless for the new writer the admiration which an awkward boy who never receives any marks for gymnastics feels when he watches another more nimble.

There was a time at which people recognised things quite easily in pictures when it was Fromentin who had painted them, and could not recognise them at all when it was Renoir.

they forget the element of Time,

To succeed thus in gaining recognition, the original painter, the original writer proceeds on the lines adopted by oculists.

the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears

was led to ask myself whether there was indeed any truth in the distinction which we are always making between art, which is no more advanced now than in Homer’s day, and science with its continuous progress.

People foolishly imagine that the vast dimensions of social phenomena afford them an excellent opportunity to penetrate farther into the human soul; they ought, on the contrary, to realise that it is by plumbing

the depths of a single personality that they might have a chance of understanding those phenomena.

but they did enjoy telling people how they had done as much for her and more than the richest in the land.

she could think of nothing so cruel as to tear a poor wretch from the death that she had deliberately sought and restore her to her living martyrdom.

opinion that a Republic could not have any diplomacy or foreign alliances, and, more recently, that the peasant class would not tolerate the separation of Church and State.

the table decorations or my presence—that

simply and solely because none of them knows how to swim),

conversation something which to the Courvoisiers appeared ‘fearfully like’ Oriane’s

Mme. d’Epinay,

genuinely

fond ...

jealous ...