Quotessence
Home / Books / Swann’s Way

Swann’s Way

Book by Marcel Proust · 39 quotes · Love, Pleasure, Jealousy

Filter quotes by topic

AllLovePleasureJealousyRomanceشکسترابطهاحساساتجداییDescriptionعشقEmotionsHeartbreakRelationshipsSocietyCharacterIn Search Of Lost TimeLifeMenProustSuffering

Swann’s Way Quotes

“He recognised that all the period of Odette's life which had elapsed before she first met him, a period of which he had never sought to form any picture in his mind, was not the featureless abstraction which he could vaguely see, but had consisted of so many definite, dated years, each crowded with concrete incidents. But were he to learn more of them, he feared lest her past, now colourless, fluid and supportable, might assume a tangible, an obscene form, with individual and diabolical features. And he continued to refrain from seeking a conception of it, not any longer now from laziness of mind, but from fear of suffering.”

Jealousy
Book:Swann’s Way
Create image

“He made what apology he could and hurried home, overjoyed that the satisfaction of his curiosity had preserved their love intact, and that, having feigned for so long, when in Odette's company, a sort of indifference, he had not now, by a demonstration of jealousy, given her that proof of the excess of his own passion which, in a pair of lovers, fully and finally dispenses the recipient from the obligation to love the other enough. He never spoke to her of this misadventure, he cased even to think of it himself. But now and then his thoughts in their wandering course would come upon this memory where it lay unobserved, would startle it into life, thrust it more deeply down into his consciousness, and leave him aching with a sharp, far-rooted pain.”

LoveDesireLonging
Book:Swann’s Way
Create image

“The process which had begun in her - and in he a little earlier only than it must come to all of us - was the great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.”

DeathPartingEndingsProustIn Search Of Lost TimeSwann S Way
Book:Swann’s Way
Create image

“He went farther; agonised by the reflection, at the moment when it passed by him, so near and yet so infinitely remote, that, while it was addressed to their ears, it knew them not, he would regret, almost, that it had a meaning of its own, an intrinsic and unalterable beauty, foreign to themselves, just as in the jewels given to us, or even in the letters written to us by a woman with whom we are in love, we find fault with the 'water' of a stone, or with the words of a sentence because they are not fashioned exclusively from the spirit of a fleeting intimacy and of a 'lass unaparalleled.”

LoveWomanDescriptionLetterFault
Book:Swann’s Way
Create image

“Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called 'useful,' when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking-stick, she would choose 'antiques,' as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own.”

LifeWomenPersonalityPresentAntiquesDescriptive
Book:Swann’s Way
Create image

“... she exclaimed, the innate respectability of the middle-class housewife rising impulsively to the surface through the acquired dilettantism of the 'light woman.' People who enjoyed 'picking-up' things, who admired poetry, despised sordid calculations of profit and loss, and nourished ideals of honour and love, she placed in a class by themselves, superior to the rest of humanity.”

HumanitySocietyWomanMiddle Class
Book:Swann’s Way
Create image

“Mas ni desde la óptica de las cosas de menor significado somos los hombres un conjunto materialmente establecido, semejante para todos, y del que cualquiera puede saber, tal como si fuésemos un documento de condiciones o un testamento. Nuestra naturaleza social es una construcción del pensamiento de los otros e incluso esa acción tan sencilla que denominamos " ver a uno que conocemos" es parcialmente de índole intelectual. Completamos el aspecto físico de aquel que tenemos frente a nosotros con la sumad e los conceptos que elaboramos sobre él, la imagen completa que nos formamos de él está compuesta en su mayor proporción por esos conceptos, los que terminan por insuflar en tal medida sus mejillas, por establecer con tal absoluta adhesión el corte de sus narices y por darle tan sutilmente el tono a lo sonoro de su voz, como si esta no fuese otra cosa que un traslúcido envase. En cada ocasión en la que observamos ese semblante y escuchamos dicha voz, aquello que se aprecia son esos conceptos.”

MarcelproustPor El Camino De Swann
Book:Swann’s Way
Create image

“Sentindo-se desde algum tempo indisposto e melancólico, principalmente depois que Odette apresentara Forcheville aos Verdurin, desejaria ir descansar um pouco no campo. Mas não teria coragem de deixar Paris um único dia enquanto Odette ali estivesse. A atmosfera estava quente; eram os mais belos dias de primavera. E muito embora atravessasse uma cidade pétrea para meter-se nalgum recinto fechado, o que sempre tinha diante dos olhos era um parque que possuía perto de Combray, onde, desde as quatro horas, antes de chegar à horta de aspargos, graças ao vento que sopra dos campos de Méséglise, se podia, debaixo de uma latada, gozar de tanta frescura como à beira do tanque bordado de miosótis e palmas-santa-rita, e onde, quando ele jantava, corriam em torno da mesa, afestoados pelo jardineiro, os ramos de groselhas e rosas.”

PrimaveraFloresCombrayRosasForchevilleGroselhasMiosótisPalmas De Santa RitaVerdurin
Book:Swann’s Way
Create image

“This compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without result was so cruel that one day, noticing a swelling over his stomach, he felt an actual joy in the idea that he had, perhaps, a tumor that would prove fatal, that he need not concern himself with anything further, since it was this malady that was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the not-distant end. If indeed, at his period, it often happened that, though without admitting it even to himself, he longed for death, it was in order to escape not so much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the monotony of his struggle.”

LiteratureClassicFrenchProustModernistMarcel ProustIn Search Of Lost TimeSwann S WayOdetteSwannFrench LitClassic Lit
Book:Swann’s Way
Create image

“He suffered greatly from being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounded him all the more cruelly since, being ignorant of his love, incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest, or of doing more than smile at it as at some childish joke, or deplore it as an act of insanity, they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective state which existed for himself alone, whose reality there was nothing external to confirm; he suffered overwhelmingly, to the point at which even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry, from having to prolong his exile in this place to which Odette would never come, in which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was entirely absent.”

LoveLove QuotesMelancholyFrenchClassicsProustFrench LiteratureModernistMarcel ProustIn Search Of Lost TimeSwann S WaySwannFrench LitFrench Writers
Book:Swann’s Way
Create image

“The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than those which come to us in sleep; why, then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops our perception of them.”

WritingReadingLiteratureBooksWords
Book:Swann’s Way
Create image

“And so too, in later years, when I began to write a book of my own, and the quality of some sentences seemed so inadequate that I could not make up my mind to go on with the undertaking. I would find the equivalent in Bergotte. But it was only then, when I read them in his pages, that I could enjoy them; when it was I myself who composed them, in my anxiety that they should exactly reproduce what I had perceived in my mind's eye, and in my fear of their not turning out "true to life," how could I find time to ask myself whether what I was writing was pleasing!”

Writing
Book:Swann’s Way
Create image

“Like many other men, Swann had a naturally lazy mind and lacked imagination. He knew perfectly well as a general truth that human life is full of contrasts, but in the case of each individual human being he imagined all that part of his or her life with which he was not familiar as being identical with the part with which he was. He imagined what was kept secret from him in the light of what was revealed.”

LazySecret LifeLacking Imagination
Book:Swann’s Way
Create image

“... the burrowing wasp, which in order to provide a supply of fresh meat for her offspring after her own decease, calls in the science of anatomy to amplify the resources of her instinctive cruelty, and, having made a collection of weevils and spiders, proceeds with marvellous knowledge and skill to pierce the nerve-centre on which their power of locomotion (but none of their other vital functions) depends, so that the paralysed insect, beside which her egg is laid, will furnish the larva, when it is hatched, with a tamed and inoffensive quarry, incapable either of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh for the larder...”

SurvivalCrueltyWasp
Book:Swann’s Way
Create image

“Sometimes, as Eve was born from one of Adam’s ribs, a woman was born during my sleep from a cramped position of my thigh. Formed from the pleasure I was on the point of enjoying, she, I imagined, was the one offering it to me. My body, which felt in hers my own warmth, would try to find itself inside her, I would wake up. The rest of humanity seemed very remote compared to this woman I had left scarcely a few moments before; my cheek was still warm from her kiss, my body aching from the weight of hers. If, as sometimes happens, she had the features of a woman I had known in life, I would devote myself entirely to this end: to finding her again, like those who go off on a journey to see a longed-for city with their own eyes and imagine that one can enjoy in reality the charm of a dream. Little by little, the memory of her would fade, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.”

SleepDreaming
Book:Swann’s Way
Create image