Marcel Proust

Swann's Way is one of the preeminent novels of childhood: a sensitive boy's impressions of his family and neighbors, all brought dazzlingly back to life years later by the taste of a madeleine. It also enfolds the short novel "Swann in Love," an incomparable study of sexual jealousy that becomes a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure of In Search of Lost Time. The first volume of the work that established Proust as one of the finest voices of the modern age — satirical, skeptical, confiding, and endlessly varied in its response to the human condition — Swann's Way also stands on its own as a perfect rendering of a life in art, of the past re-created through memory. 

In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Swann's Way

Victoria 

in altri tempi aveva spesso pensato con terrore che, un giorno , avrebbe finito d'essere innamorato di Odette, si era ripromesso di vigilare e , non appena si fosse accorto che il suo amore cominciava ad abbandonarlo, di aggrapparsi per trattenerlo. ma ecco che all'affievolirsi dell'amore corrispondeva simultaneamente un affievolirsi del desiderio di rimanere innamorato. infatti non si può cambiare, cioè diventare un'altra persona, finché si continua ad obbedire ai sentimenti di quella che non esiste più. [...] ma, il più delle volte, quando si sforzava, se non di rimanere in quella fase così particolare della sua vita dalla quale stava uscendo, perlomeno di averne una visione chiara finché era ancora possibile, si accorgeva che, invece, non lo era già più; avrebbe voluto contemplare, come un paesaggio che sta per svanire, quell'amore che aveva appena abbandonato

Ghee

For, if unduly prolonged, the rapture of waiting for Eulalie became a torture, and my aunt would never stop looking at the time, and yawning, and complaining of each of her symptoms in turn. Eulalie's ring, if it sounded from the front door at the very end of the day, when she was no longer expecting it, would almost make her ill.

Nkechi A

People who learn somne correct detail about another person's life at once draw conclusions from it which are not accurate, and see in the newly discovered fact an explanation of things that have no connexion with it whatsoever

Alawander Bouston 

For even if we have the sensation of being always surrounded by our own soul, it is not as though by a motionless prison: rather, we are in some sense borne along with it in a perpetual leap to go beyond it, to reach the outside, with a sort of discouragement as we hear around us always that same resonance, which is not an echo from outside but the resounding of an internal vibration.

Swann's Way quotes

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