Hailie’s Reviews > Within a Budding Grove > Status Update

“But certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.”

“We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.”

“I used often to […] write to her to say that I could not come, but with the same protestations of disappointment as I should have made to someone whom I had not wished to see. These expressions of regret, which we reserve as a rule for people who do not matter, would do more, I imagined, to persuade Gilberte of my indifference than would the tone of indifference which we affect only towards those we love.”

“It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions.”

“It is true that Gilberte was an only child, but there were, at the least, two Gilbertes. The two natures, her father's and her mother's, did more than just blend themselves in her; they disputed the possession of her.”

“It is, of course, common knowledge that a child takes after both its father and its mother. And yet the distribution of the qualities and defects which it inherits is so oddly planned that, of two good qualities which seemed inseparable in one of the parents, only one will be found in the child, and allied to the very fault in the other parent which seemed most irreconcilable with it.”

“Highly strung people ought always to love, as the lower orders say, 'beneath' them, so that their women have a material inducement to be at their disposal."

“Perhaps the more the great writer developed in Bergotte at the expense of the little man with the beard, the more his own persona life was drowned in the flood of all the lives that he imagined, until he no longer felt himself obliged to perform certain practical duties, for which he had substituted the duty of imagining those other lives.”

“And then I asked myself whether originality did indeed prove that great writers are gods, ruling each over a kingdom that is his alone, or whether there is not an element of sham in it all, whether the differences between one man's books and another's were not the result of their respective labours rather than the expression of a radical and essential difference between diverse personalities.”

“But like those persons recently decorated who, their investiture once accomplished, would like to see the fountain of honour turned off at the main, Mme Bontemps would have preferred that, after herself, no one else in her own circle should be made known to the Princess.”