John Pendrey’s Reviews > In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1: The Way by Swann's > Status Update
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You can never finish reading Proust.
“And so, if I always imagined the woman I loved in the setting I most longed at the time to visit, if I wished that it was her who showed it to me, who opened the gates of an unknown world, it was not by the mere hazard of a simple association of thoughts; no, it was because…..”
— Dec 17, 2022 10:41PM
“And so, if I always imagined the woman I loved in the setting I most longed at the time to visit, if I wished that it was her who showed it to me, who opened the gates of an unknown world, it was not by the mere hazard of a simple association of thoughts; no, it was because…..”
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is on page 92 of 451
Irresistible Desire to Kiss the Hand of the Lady in Pink.
“My heart beat loud while I repeated to myself "Shall I do it, shall I not?”and then I ceased to ask myself what I ought to do so as at least to do something. With a blind, insensate gesture, divested of all the reasons in its favour that I had thought of a moment before, I seized and raised to my lips the hand she held out to me.”
— Dec 12, 2022 10:15PM
“My heart beat loud while I repeated to myself "Shall I do it, shall I not?”and then I ceased to ask myself what I ought to do so as at least to do something. With a blind, insensate gesture, divested of all the reasons in its favour that I had thought of a moment before, I seized and raised to my lips the hand she held out to me.”
…then I realised both the rare worth of a creature such as Mademoiselle Swann and, at the same time, how coarse and ignorant I should appear to her; and I felt so keenly how sweet and how impossible it would be for me to become her friend that I was filled at once with longing and despair. Henceforth, more often than not when I thought of her, I would see her standing before the porch of a cathedral, explaining to me what each of the statues meant, and, with a smile which was my highest commendation, presenting me as her friend to Bergotte. And invariably the charm of all the fancies which the thought of cathedrals used to inspire in me, the charm of the hills and valleys of the Ile-de-France and of the plains of Normandy, would be reflected in the picture I had formed in my mind's eye of Mlle Swann; nothing more remained but to know and to love her. The belief that a person has a share in an unknown life to which his or her love may win us admission is, of all the prerequisites of love, the one which it values most highly and which makes it set little store by all the rest. Even those women who claim to judge a man by his looks alone, see in those looks the emanation of a special way of life. That is why they fall in love with soldiers or with firemen; the uniform makes them less particular about the face; they feel they are embracing beneath the gleaming breastplate a heart different from the rest, more gallant, more adventurous, more tender…..
from ’In Search of Lost Time’ by Marcel Proust