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The Guermantes Way

Book by Marcel Proust · 2 quotes · Proust, Death, Love

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The Guermantes Way Quotes

“one cannot properly describe human life unless one bathes it in the sleep into which it plunges night after night and which sweeps round it as a promontory is encircled by the sea…Indeed, what one has meant to do during the day it turns out, sleep intervening, that one accomplishes only in one's dreams, that is to say after it has been diverted by drowsiness into following a different path from that which one would have chosen when awake. The same story branches off and has a different ending. When all is said, the world in which we live when we are asleep is so different that people who have difficulty in going to sleep seek first of all the escape from the waking world. After having desperately, for hours on end, with their eyes closed, resolved in their minds thoughts similar to those which they would have had with their eyes open, they take heart again on noticing that the preceding minute has been weighed down by a line of reasoning in strict contradiction to the laws of logic and the reality of the present, this brief 'absence' signifying that the door is now open through which they may perhaps presently be able to escape from the perception of the real, to advance to a resting-place more or less remote from it, which will mean having a more or less 'good' night. But already a great stride has been made when we turn our backs on the real, when we reach the outer caves in which 'auto suggestions' prepare—like witches—the hell-broth of imaginary illnesses or of the recurrence of nervous disorders, and watch for the hour when the spasms which has been building up during the unconsciousness of sleep will be unleashed with sufficient force to make sleep cease.”

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