The Guermantes Way |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
actress admiration appear asked aunt Balbec Bergotte Berma Bloch Borodino Boulbon Bréauté Cambremer Champs-Elysées Charlus charming colour Combray conversation cousin d'Argencourt dinner Doncières drawing-room dream Dreyfus Dreyfusard Duc de Châtellerault Duchesse de Guermantes Elstir eyes face father Faubourg Faubourg Saint-Germain feel felt flowers France Françoise friends Fronde gave gaze give grandmother Guer hand hear heard heart idea imagined Jupien keep knew lady leave less listen longer look mantes Marquise Marsantes mind mistress morning mother nature never night Norpois once Paris perhaps person Phèdre pleasure Prince Prince of Saxony Princesse Rachel realised replied Robert Saint-Loup seemed seen shew sleep smile society sort speak suppose Swann talk tell theatre thing thought tion told tone turned Villeparisis voice waiting woman words young
Popular passages
Page 83 - And thus it was she who first gave me the idea that a person does not (as I had imagined) stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to...
Page 179 - ... remind ourselves of these feelings and the stories of the gods and goddesses and heroes in which these feelings find expression, to be reminded of how we felt as children to our parents and the big people of our childhood. Writing of a first telephone call from his grandmother, Proust says: ' ... it was rather that this isolation of the voice was like a symbol, a presentation, a direct consequence of another isolation, that of my grandmother, separated for the first time in my life, from myself....
Page 195 - One of my dreams was the synthesis of what my imagination had often sought to depict, in my waking hours, of a certain seagir.t place and its mediaeval past. In my sleep I saw a gothic city rising from a sea whose waves were stilled as in a stained-glass window. An arm of the sea divided the town in two; the green water stretched to my feet; on the opposite shore it washed round the base of an oriental church, and beyond it houses which existed already in the fourteenth century...
Page 113 - Or were some memories also asleep in us of which we now become conscious? The resurrection at our awakening — after that healing attack of mental alienation which is sleep — must after all be similar to what occurs when we recapture a name, a line, a refrain that we had forgotten. And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory.
Page 177 - ... his grandmother or his betrothed in the act of turning over a book, of shedding tears, of gathering flowers, close by the spectator and yet very far away, in the place where she actually is at the moment. We need only, so that the miracle may be accomplished, apply our lips to the magic orifice and invoke— occasionally for rather longer than seems to us necessary, I admit — the Vigilant Virgins to whose voices we listen every day without ever coming to know their faces, and who are our guardian...
Page 409 - For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognised in a few years
Page 180 - Granny!" I cried to her ... but I had beside me only that voice, a phantom, as unpalpable as that which would come to revisit me when my grandmother was dead. 'Speak to me!' but then it happened that, left more solitary still, I ceased to catch the sound of her voice. My grandmother could no longer hear me ... I continued to call her, sounding the empty night, in which I felt that her appeals also must be straying. I was shaken by the same anguish which, in the distant past, I had felt once before,...
Page 188 - I saw, sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, redfaced, heavy and vulgar, sick, vacant, letting her slightly crazed eyes wander over a book, a dejected old woman whom I did not know.
Page 46 - ... of a halcyon's nest. Over her hair, reaching in front to her eyebrows and caught back lower down at the level of her throat, was spread a net upon which those little white shells which are gathered on some shore of the South Seas alternated with pearls, a marine mosaic barely emerging from the waves and at every moment plunged back again into a darkness in the depths of which even then a human presence was revealed by the ubiquitous flashing of the Princess's eyes.
Page 84 - ... but is a shadow, which we can never succeed in penetrating, of which there can be no such thing as direct knowledge, with respect to which we form countless beliefs, based upon his words and sometimes upon his actions, though neither...