Swann's Way Quotes

“I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a bit of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause. It had immediately rendered the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not merely inside me, it was me.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks. Suppose that, towards, morning, after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is reading, in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to sleep, he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its course, and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time, but will conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he gets drowsy in some even more abnormal position; sitting in an armchair, say, after dinner: then the world will go hurtling out of orbit, the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space, and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier in another place. But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness; I was more destitute than the cave-dweller; but then the memory - not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived and might now very possibly be - would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse centuries of civilisation, and out of a blurred glimpse of oil-lamps, then of shirts with turned-down collars, would gradually piece together the original components of my ego.
Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them. For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would endeavour to construe from the pattern of its tiredness the position of its various limbs, in order to deduce therefrom the direction of the wall, the location of the furniture, to piece together and give a name to the house in which it lay. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulder-blades, offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept, while the unseen walls, shifting and adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirled round it in the dark.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“Tiếp sau niềm xác tín trung tâm ấy, mà trong khi tôi đọc sách, không ngừng vận động từ trong ra ngoài, hướng tới việc phát hiện chân lý, là những xúc cảm do hành động mà tôi tham gia đem lại, bơi những buổi chiều ấy đầy ắp những biến cố giàu kịch tính nhiều khi hơn cả một cuộc đời. Đó là những biến cố xảy đến trong trang sách tôi đang đọc; đành rằng những nhân vật chịu tác động của các biến cố này không "có thật" như Françoise thường nói. Nhưng tất cả tình cảm mà niềm vui hay nỗi bất hạnh của một nhân vật có thật gây cho ta chỉ nảy sinh trong ta qua trung gian của một hình ảnh về niềm vui hay nỗi bất hạnh ấy; sự tài tình của tiểu thuyết gia đầu tiên là hiểu được rằng, trong cơ quan xúc cảm của chúng ta, vì hình ảnh là thành tố thiết yếu duy nhất, nên sự giản lược tức là bỏ hẳn đi những nhân vật có thật sẽ là một bước hoàn thiện quyết định. Một con người có thật, dù ta đồng cảm với họ sâu sắc đến mấy, phần lớn vẫn do giác quan ta tri nhận, nghĩa là đối với ta, con người ấy vẫn mờ đục, có một trọng lượng chết mà sự nhạy cảm của ta không nâng lên nổi. Một tai họa có giáng xuống người ấy, ta cũng chỉ có thể xúc động vì tai họa này ở một phần nhỏ của khái niệm trọn vẹn mà ta có về họ, hơn thế nữa, chính họ sẽ chỉ có thể xúc động ở một phần của khái niệm trọn vẹn mà họ có về bản thân. Khám phá quý giá của nhà tiểu thuyết là đã có sáng kiến thay thế những phần bất khả thấu triệt đối với tâm hồn bằng một số lượng tương đương những phần phi vật chất, nghĩa là những phần mà tâm hồn ta có thể đồng hóa thành của mình. Từ bấy thì quan trọng gì nếu hành động, nếu xúc cảm của những sinh thể thuộc loại mới này dường như thực đối với ta, bởi ta đã biến những điều đó thành của ta, bởi chúng diễn ra trong ta, bởi chúng khiến hơi thở gấp gáp của ta, ánh mắt đau đáu của ta phụ thuộc vào chúng trong khi ta bồn chồn lật các trang sách. Và một khi nhà tiểu thuyết đặt ta vào trạng thái này, ở đó xúc động nào cũng được nhân lên gấp mười, giống như ở mọi trạng thái thuần túy nội tâm, ở đó cuốn sách của ông sẽ khiến ta bấn loạn theo kiểu một giấc mơ nhưng là một giấc mơ sáng tỏ hơn những giấc mơ khi ta đang ngủ và hồi ức sẽ lâu bền hơn, thì khi ấy, ông kích động nơi ta trong một giờ đồng hồ mọi niềm hạnh phúc và mọi nỗi khổ đau có thể, mà ta sẽ phải mất nhiều năm trong đời mới biết được vài nỗi niềm, và những nỗi niềm mãnh liệt nhất sẽ chẳng bao giờ được phát lộ với ta vì chúng xảy ra chậm rãi khiến ta không tri giác được chúng; (cũng như trong đời, lòng ta thay đổi, và đó là nỗi đau tệ hại nhất; nhưng ta chỉ biết được nỗi đau này khi đọc sách, bằng tưởng tượng: trong thực tế thì giống như một số hiện tượng tự nhiên thường xảy ra, lòng ta thay đổi đủ chậm rãi để nếu như ta có liên tiếp nhận thấy mỗi trạng thái khác biệt của nó, thì bù lại ta tránh được chính cảm giác về sự thay đổi).”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“How often, after that day, in the course of my walks along the Guermantes way, and with what an intensified melancholy, did I reflect on my lack of qualification for a literary career, and abandon all hope of ever becoming a famous author. The regrets that I felt for this, as I lingered behind to muse awhile on my own, made me suffer so acutely that, in order to banish them, my mind of its own accord, by a sort of inhibition in the face of pain, ceased entirely to think of verse-making, of fiction, of the poetic future on which my lack of talent precluded me from counting. Then, quite independently of all these literary preoccupations and in no way connected with them, suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight on a stone, the smell of a path would make me stop still, to enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they appeared to be concealing, beyond what my eyes could see, something which they invited me to come and take but which despite all my efforts I have never managed to discover. Since I felt that this something was to be found in them, I would stand there motionless, looking, breathing, endeavouring to penetrate with my mind beyond the thing seen or smelt. And if I then had to hasten after my grandfather, to continue my walk, I would try to racapture them by closing my eyes; I would concentrate on recalling exactly the line of the roof, the colour of the stone, which, without my being able to understand why, had seemed to me to be bursting, ready to open, to yield up to me the secret treasure of which they were themselves no more than the lids. It was certainly not impressions of this kind that could restore the hope I had lost of succeeding one day in becoming an author and poet, for each of them was associated with some material object devoid of intellectual value and suggesting no abstract truth. But at least they gave me an unreasoning pleasure, the illusion of a sort of fecundity, and thereby distracted me from the tedium, from the sense of my own impotence which I had felt whenever I had sought a philosophic theme for some great literary work. But so arduous was the task imposed on my conscience by those impressions of form or scent or colour - to try to perceive what lay hidden beneath them - that I was not long in seeking an excuse which would allow me to relax so strenuous an effort and to spare myself the fatigue that it involved.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her. And so, at an age when it would appear -- since one seeks in love before everything else a subjective pleasure -- that the taste for a woman's beauty must play the largest part in it, love may come into being, love of the most physical kind, without any foundation in desire. At this time of life one has already been wounded more than once by the darts of love; it no longer evolves by itself, obeying its own incomprehensible and fatal laws, before our passive and astonished heart. We come to its aid, we falsify it by memory and by suggestion. Recognising one of its symptoms, we remember and recreate the rest.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“Unlike so many people who, either from lack of energy or else from a resigned sense of the obligation laid upon them by their social grandeur to remain moored like house-boats to a particular point on the shore of life, abstain from the pleasures which are offered to them outside the worldly situation in which they remain confined until the day of their death, and are content, in the end, to describe as pleasures, for want of any better, those mediocre distractions, that just bearable tedium which it encompasses, Swann did not make an effort to find attractive the women with whom he spent his time, but sought to spend his time with women whom he had already found attractive.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“Just as it is not by other men of intelligence that an intelligent man is afraid of being thought a fool, so it is not by a nobleman but by an oaf that a man of fashion is afraid of finding his social value underrated. Three-quarters of the mental ingenuity and the mendacious boasting squandered ever since the world began by people who are only cheapened thereby, have been aimed at inferiors.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“But if, for me, this desire that a woman should appear added something more exalting to the charms of nature, they in their turn enlarged what I might have found too restricted in the charms of the woman. It seemed to me that the beauty of the trees was hers also, and that her kisses would reveal to me the spirit of those horizons, of the village of Roussainville, of the books which I was reading that year; and, my imagination drawing strength from contact with my sensuality, my sensuality expanding through all the realms of my imagination, my desire no longer had any bounds. Moreover - just as in moments of musing contemplation of nature, the normal actions of the mind being suspended, and our abstract ideas of things set aside, we believe with the profoundest faith in the originality, in the individual existence of the place in which we may happen to be - the passing figure whom my desire evoked seemed to be not just any specimen of the genus "woman," but a necessary and natural produce of this particular soil. For at that time everything that was not myself, the earth and the creatures upon it, seemed to me more precious, more important, endowed with a more real existence than they appear to full-grown men. And between the earth and its creatures I made no distinction. [...] But to wander thus among the woods of Roussainville without a peasant-girl to embrace was to see those woods and yet know nothing of their secret treasure, their deep-hidden beauty. That girl whom I invariably saw dappled with the shadows of their leaves was to me herself a plant of local growth, merely of a higher species than the rest, and one whose structure would enable me to get closer than through them to the intimate savour of the country. I could believe this all the more readily (and also that the caresses by which she would bring that savour to my senses would themselves be of a special kind, yielding a pleasure which I could never derive from anyone else) since I was still, and must for long remain, in that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has tasted it, when one has not yet reduced it to a general idea which makes one regard them thenceforward as the interchangeable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same. Indeed, that pleasure does not even exist, isolated, distinct, formulated in the consciousness, as the ultimate aim for which one seeks a woman's company, or as the cause of the preliminary perturbation that one feels. Scarcely does one think of it as a pleasure in store for one; rather does one call it her charm; for one does not think of oneself, but only of escaping from oneself. Obscurely awaited, immanent and concealed, it simply raises to such a paroxysm, at the moment when at last it makes itself felt, those kisses, of the woman by our side, that it seems to us, more than anything else, a sort of transport of gratitude for her kindness of heart and for her touching predilection for us, which we measure by the blessings and the happiness that she showers upon us.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“So the "Meseglise way" and the Guermantes way" remain for me linked with many of the little incidents of the life which, of all the various lives we lead concurrently, is the most episodic, the most full of vicissitudes; I mean the life of the mind. Doubtless it progresses within us imperceptibly, and we had for a long time been preparing for the discovery of the truths which have changed its meaning and its aspect, have opened new paths for us; but that preparation was unconscious; and for us those truths date only from the day, from the minute when they became apparent. The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which surrounded their apparition still lingers around the memory of them with its unconscious or unheeding countenance; and, certainly, when they were contemplated at length by that humble passerby, by that dreaming child - as the face of a king is contemplated by a memorialist buried in the crowd - that piece of nature, that corner of a garden could never suppose that it would be thanks to him that they would be elected to survive in all their most ephemeral details; and yet the scent of hawthorn which flits along the hedge from which, in a little while, the dog-roses will have banished it, a sound of echoless footsteps on a gravel path, a bubble formed against the side of a water-plant by the current of the stream and instantaneously bursting - all these my exaltation of mind has borne along with it and kept alive through the succession of the years, while all around them the paths have vanished and those who trod them, and even the memory of those who trod them, are dead. Sometimes the fragment of landscape thus transported into the present will detach itself in such isolation from all associations that it floats uncertainly in my mind like a flowering Delos, and I am unable to say from what place, from what time - perhaps, quite simply, from what dream - it comes. But it is pre-eminently as the deepest layer of my mental soil, as the firm ground on which I still stand, that I regard the Meseglise and the Guermantes ways. It is because I believed in this and in people while I walked along those paths that the things and the people they made known to me are the only ones that I still take seriously and that still bring me joy. Whether it is because the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or because reality takes shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“It has since struck me as one of the most touching aspects of the part played in life by these idle, painstaking women that they devote their generosity, their talent, a disposable dream of sentimental beauty (for, like artists, they never seek to realise the value of their dreams, or to enclose them in the four-square frame of everyday life), and a wealth that counts for little, to the fashioning of a fine and precious setting for the rough, ill-polished lives of men.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“It is the same in life; the heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune ; but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination ; for in reality its alteration, like that of a certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.”
― Marcel Proust , Swann's Way

“And so I concerned myself no longer with the mystery that lay hidden in a form or a perfume, quite at ease in my mind, since I was taking it home with me, protected by its visible and tangible covering, beneath which I should find it still alive, like the fish which, on days when I had been allowed to go out fishing, I used to carry back in my basket, buried in a couch of grass which kept them cool and fresh. Once in the house again I would begin to think of something else, and so my mind would become littered (as my room was with the flowers that I had gathered on my walks, or the odds and ends that people had given me) with a stone from the surface of which the sunlight was reflected, a roof, the sound of a bell, the smell of fallen leaves, a confused mass of different images, under which must have perished long ago the reality of which I used to have some foreboding, but which I never had the energy to discover and bring to light.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“Başka insanların Swann'la karşılaştıklarında, çehresinde hüküm süren ve adeta doğal bir sınır olan kemerli burnunda duran zarafeti görmelerini sağlayan, Swann'ın yüksek sosyete hayatına ilişkin sayısız özellik, bizim ailenin şekillendirdiği Swann'da bilgisizlik nedeniyle eksik bırakılmıştı şüphesiz; ama bizimkiler de, bu sayede, nüfuzunu yansıtmayan bu boş ve geniş çehreyi, bu azımsanan gözlerin derinliğini, sayfiye komşuluğu hayatımızın, haftalık akşam yemeklerinden sonra oyun masasının etrafında veya bahçede birlikte geçirilen aylak saatlerinin-yarı hatıra, yarı unutuş olan- o belirsiz ve hoş tortusuyla doldurabilmişlerdi.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“Baktığımız insanın dış görünüşünü ona ilişkin bütün kavramlarımızla doldururuz ve gözümüzde canlandırdığımız bütün içinde, hiç şüphesiz bu kavramlar daha fazla yer tutar. Sonuçta yanakları öylesine kusursuz bir biçimde doldururlar, burun çizgisini öylesine şaşmaz bir kesinlikle izlerler, sesin tınısıyla, sanki saydam bir kılıfmışçasına, öyle bir uyumla bütünleşirler ki, bu çehreyi her gördüğümüzde, bu sesi her duyduğumuzda, karşımızda bulunduğumuz, işittiğimiz şey bu kavramlardır.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“My grandmother, in all weathers, even when the rain was coming down in torrents and Françoise had rushed indoors with the precious wicker armchairs, so that they should not get soaked—you would see my grandmother pacing the deserted garden, lashed by the storm, pushing back her grey hair in disorder so that her brows might be more free to imbibe the life-giving draughts of wind and rain. She would say, “At last one can breathe!” and would run up and down the soaking paths—too straight and symmetrical for her liking.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“Had the truth been known, there was not one of the 'faithful' who was not infinitely more malicious than Swann; but the others would all take the precaution of tempering their malice with obvious pleasantries, with little sparks of emotion and cordiality; while the least indication of reserve on Swann's part, undraped in any such conventional formula as 'Of course, I don't want to say anything--' to which he would have scorned to descend, appeared to them a deliberate act of treachery. There are certain original and distinguished authors in whom the least 'freedom of speech' is thought revolting because they have not begun by flattering the public taste, and serving up to it the commonplace expressions to which it is is used; it was by the same process that Swann infuriated M. Verdurin.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way