Meghan’s Reviews > The Captive / The Fugitive > Status Update

'His character remained unaltered, but his style had become less precious, as happens to certain people who shed their mannerisms when, ceasing to compose symbolist poetry, they take to writing serial novels.'

'(stupefying habit, which during the whole course of our lives conceals from us almost the whole universe, and in dead of night, without changing the label, substitutes for the most dangerous or intoxicating poisons of life something anodyne that procures no delights)'

'People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked.'

'Each artist seems thus to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten, and which is different from that whence another great artist, setting sail for the earth, will emerge.'

'It is difficult, he reasoned, to refuse an invitation from someone in whose bathrobe one is.'

'I had promised Albertine that, if I did not go out with her, I would settle down to work. But in the morning, just as if, taking advantage of our being asleep, the house had miraculously flown, I awoke in a different weather beneath another clime. We do not begin to work as soon as we disembarking strange country to the conditions of which we have to adapt ourselves. And each day was for me a different country.'

'We quickly forget what we have not deeply considered, what has been dictated to us by the spirit of imitation, by the passions of the day. Even more than diplomats, politicians are unable to remember the point of view which they adopted at a certain moment, and some of their palinodes are due less to an excess of ambition than to a deficiency of memory.'