Oliver Zelman’s Reviews > In Search of Lost Time: Volume 1: The Way by Swann's > Status Update

“Though Odette might subtract from her confession all the essential part, there remained in accessory part something Swann never imagined, that crushed him with its newness, and would permit him to change the terms of the problem of his jealousy. And these admissions he could no longer forget. His soul bore them among, cast them aside, cradled them, like dead bodies. And it was poisoned by them.”

“At this time of life one has already been wounded more than once by the darts of love; it no longer evolves by itself, obeying its own incomprehensible and fatal laws, before our passive and astonished hearts. We come to its aid, we falsify it by memory and by suggestion. Recognizing one of its symptoms, we remember and re-create the rest.”

“At the time of life, tinged already with disenchantment, which Swann was approaching, when a man can content himself with being in love for the pleasure of loving without expecting too much in return, this mutual sympathy, it is no longer as in early youth the goal towards which love inevitably tends, is nevertheless bound to it by so strong an association of ideas that it may well become the cause of love”