Paula’s Reviews > Swann’s Way > Status Update

”He would get into his carriage, but he would feel that this thought had leaped into it at the same time and settled on his knees like a beloved pet which one takes everywhere and which he would keep with him at the table, unbeknownst to the other guests. He would stroke it, warm himself at it, yield to a light quivering that tensed his neck, all the while fastening the columbines in his buttonhole.”

"She often said: 'I do believe, of course, that poetry—well, that there could be nothing more beautiful if it was true, if poets really believed everything they said. But quite often, those people are the most calculating of all. I know something about it, because a friend of mine was in love with a poet of sorts.'"

"All day long, during those walks, I had been able to dream about what a pleasure it would be to be a friend of the Duchesse de Guermantes, to fish for trout, to go out in a boat on the Vivonne, and, greedy for happiness, ask no more from life in those moments than for it always to be made up of a succession of happy afternoons."

”She would show me the flowers that leaned along the low walls, and teach me their names. She would make me tell her the subjects of the poems that I intended to compose. And these dreams warned me that since I wanted to be a writer someday, it was time to find out what I meant to write. But as soon as I asked myself this, (…) I could no longer see anything but empty space before my attentive eyes.”

”It was like any attitude or action that reveals a person’s deep and hidden character: it has no connection with anything he has said before, we cannot seek confirmation from the culprit’s testimony for he will not confess; we are reduced to the testimony of our own senses concerning which we wonder, confronting this isolated and incoherent memory, if they were not the victims of an illusion.”

Just reached the farthest point I got to in the book in my first attempt at reading it 7 years ago - as signalled by the NYC bookmark and pressed fall leaves that I left on this page. And so I am surprised and impressed by how much I'm enjoying it this time around - and for various reasons? The child's perspective narrated in hindsight by an adult; the meta-passages where the narrator theorizes about reading; etc

The precious and fragile kiss that Mama usually entrusted to me in my bed when I was going to sleep I would have to convey from the dining room to my bedroom and protect during the whole time I undressed, (...) so that its volatile essence would not disperse and evaporate, and on precisely those evenings when I needed to receive it with most care, I had to take it, I had to snatch it brusquely, publicly.

All of Combray and its surroundings, all of this which is acquiring form and solidity, emerged, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.