Tim

“My mother, when it was a question of out having M. de Norpois. To dinner for the first time, having expressed her regret that Professor Cottard was away from home, and that she herself had quite ceased to see anything of Swann, since either of these might have helped to entertain the old Ambassador, my father replied that so eminent a guest, so distinguished a an of science as Cottard could never be out of place at a dinner-table, but that Swann, with his ostentation, his habit of crying aloud from the house-tops the name of everyone that he knew, however slightly, was an impossible Bulgarian whim the Marquis de Norpois would be sure to dismiss as - to use his own epithet - a ‘pestilent’ fellow.

And after Françoise had removed her pins from the moldings of the window frame, taken down her various cloths, and drawn back the curtains, the summer day which she disclosed seemed as dead, as immemorially ancient as would have been a sumptuously attired dynastic mummy from which our old servant had done no more than precautionally unwind the linen wrappings before displaying it to my gaze, embalmed in its vesture of gold.”
― Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove: In Search of Lost Time #2

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.


Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babylonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“In the distance, boys sweet across the sharp, neatly cut grass.

After that, Anna could choose.”
― Hal Ebbott

“We were in Study Hall, when the Headmaster entered, followed by a new boy dressed in regular clothes and a school servent carrying a large desk.

He had just been awarded the cross of the Legion of Honor.”
― Gustave Flaubert