Jim’s Reviews > Finding Time Again > Status Update

The action of the years which had transformed all the individuals I had seen today, including Gilberte herself, had certainly turned all those who still survived, as they would have done Albertine if she had not been killed, into women very different from my recollections of them. It was painful for me to have to retrieve these for myself, for time, which changes individuals, does not modify the image we have of them

Attachment to an object always brings death to its owner.

The war seemed to be continuing indefinitely, and those who had already announced several years earlier, from a reliable source, that peace negotiations had started, and even specified the clauses of the treaty, no longer bothered when they talked to you to apologize for their false reports. They had forgotten them completely, and were ready to spread new stories with equal insincerity....

It was this that gave her the blood-red mouth which she tried to keep curved in a permanent smile, in the belief that it suited her, while the approaching arrival time of the train, which Gilberte still not knowing whether her husband would actually be on it or whether he would send one of those telegrams which M de Guermantes had wittily characterized as: UNABLE TO COME: LIE FOLLOWS, made her cheeks grow pale...