Gaurav Sagar’s Reviews > In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1: The Way by Swann's > Status Update

To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!

Reality is therefore something that has no relation to possibilities, any more than the stab of a knife in our body has any relation to the gradual motions of the clouds over our head, since those words 'two or three times' carved a kind of cross in the tissue of his heart

May be it is the nothingness that is real and our entire dream is non-existent, but in that case we feel that these phrases of music, and these notions that exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing also. We will perish, but we have for hostages these divine captives who will follow us and share our fate. And death in their company is less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps less probable.

He was suffering at having to remain shut up among these people whose stupidity and absurd habits struck him all the more painfully since being unaware of his love, incapable, had they known about it, of taking interest in it or doing more than smile at it as at some childish nonsense or deplore it as utter madness, they made it appear to him as a subjective state which existed only for him

But even the ugliness of these faces, though he knew it so well, seemed new to him since their features - instead of beings signs useable in a practical way for the identification of a certain person who had until then represented a cluster of pleasures to pursue, of worries to avoid, or of courtesies to pay- now rested, coordinated only by aesthetic relations, in the autonomy of their lines.

And occasions such as this when she forgot Swann's very existence were more useful to Odette, did more to attach Swann to her, than all her coquetry. Because in this way Swann was kept in that state of painful agitation which had already been powerful enough to make his love blossom on the night when he had not found Odette at Verdurins' and had searched for her all evening

Odette did not stop talking, but her words were now no more than a long lament: her regret at not having seen Swann in the afternoon, at not having opened the door to him, had turned into true despair.

And so when she lied, overcome by fear, aware that she was not very well armed to defend herself, uncertain of success, she wanted to cry, from exhaustion, like certain children who have not slept.

And as for the voluptuous pleasure of being in love, of living by love alone, the reality of which he doubted at times, it was increased in value for him, as dilettante of immaterial sensations, by the price he was paying her for it- as we see people uncertain whether the sight of sea and the sound of its waves are delightful, convince themselves of it and also of the exceptional quality

The simple sketch was greatly disturbing to Swann because it suddenly made him see that Odette had a life which did not belong entirely to him; he wanted to know whom she had been trying please with that outfit, which he did not know she possessed