Tobin Moffatt’s Reviews > Within a Budding Grove > Status Update

'I had supposed Elstir to be a modest man, but I realised my mistake on seeing his face cloud with melancholy when, in a little speech of thanks, I uttered the word "fame." Men who believe that their works will last -as was the case with Elstir- form the habit of placing them in a period when they themselves will have crumbled to dust.'

'. . . if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew. The names which designate things correspond invariably to an intellectual motion, alien to our true impressions, and compelling us to eliminate from them everything that is not in keeping with that notion.'

'. . . as happens with every big thing which we have begun by fearing, because we know it to be incompatible with smaller things which we prize and which it does not so much deprive us of as detach us from. Before we experience it, our whole preoccupation is to know to what extent we can reconcile it with certain pleasures which cease to be pleasures as soon as we have experienced it.'

‘“Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.”’

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

"And on each of our remarks a sort of transcendent harshness was conferred by the paroxysm of their stupefying insignificance..."