Jim’s Reviews > In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower > Status Update

[T]here will always be supper parties and family celebrations that have as their life and soul somebody who is deemed to be amusing and agreeable, yet who in society proper would be given short shrift. Also, in those smaller worlds, where the aristocracy's factitious scale of grandeurs does not exist, it is replaced by distinctions that are even sillier.

Each of our friends is so inseparable from his faults that, if we are to go on liking him, we must leaven them with reminders of his talent, his kind heart, his affectionate ways, or, rather we must try, by exercising all our goodwill, to overlook them.

[T}he greater part of our memory exists outside us, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again.

Because one can avoid dangers by watching out while crossing the street, one has the impression that one can also avoid punishment. But punishments can come from within; and the unexpected danger may arise from the heart.

The whole Bergotte I had slowly and painstakingly constructed for myself, a drop at a time, like a stalactite, out of the limpid beauty of his books, had suddenly been rendered useless by the need to include the bottle-nose and the black goatee....

Theoretically, we are aware that the earth is spinning, but in reality we do not notice it: the ground we walk on seems to be stationary and gives no cause for alarm. The same happens with Time. To make its passing perceptible, novelists have to turn the hands of the clock at dizzying speed, to make the reader live through ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes.