An excerpt on Swann's thoughts concerning who sent him the anonymous letter, demonstrating some notions of social status of the time (note that "my" refers to the narrator, Marcel, who has not been born during Swann's affair):
"He also suspected my grandfather. Each time Swann had asked a favor of him, had he not always refused? And then with his bourgeois ideas he might have thought he was acting for Swann's own good. Swann also suspected Bergotte, the painter, the Verdurins, admired once more in passing the wisdom of society people in not wanting to mix in those artistic circles in which such things are possible, perhaps even openly admitted as good pranks; but he recalled certain honest traits in those bohemians, and contrasted them with the life of expediency, almost of fraudulence, into which the lack of money, the craving of luxury, the corrupting influence of their pleasures so often drive members of the aristocracy." (371)
Another excerpt concerning class, coming from the Princesse in the party I mentioned in my last post:
"Well, I'm not saying it wasn't, but it's no less ugly for all that. I understand perfectly well that one can't always have pretty things, but at least one's things should not be ridiculous. What do you expect? I can't think of anything more conventional, more bourgeois, than that horrible style--cabinets with swans' heads, like bathtubs." (351)
"The beautiful dialogue which Swann heard between the piano and the violin at the beginning of the last passage! The suppression of human speech, far from letting fantasy reign there, as one might have believed, had eliminated it; never had spoken language been such an inflexible necessity, never had it known such pertinent questions, such irrefutable answers. First the solitary piano lamented, like a bird abandoned by its mate; the violin heard it, answered it as from a neighboring tree. It was as at the beginning of the world, as if there were only the two of them still on earth, or rather in this world closed to all the rest, constructed by the logic of a creator, this world in which there would never be more than two of them: this sonata. Was it a bird, was it the soul of the little phrase, not yet fully formed, was it a fairy--this creature invisibly lamenting, whose plaint the piano afterward tenderly repeated? Its cries were so sudden that the violinist had to leap to his bow to collect them. Marvelous bird!" (365)
"But [Swann] was so much in the habit by now of finding life interesting--of admiring the curious discoveries one can make--that even while suffering to the point of believing he could not endure such pain for long, he said to himself: "Life is really astonishing; it really has great surprises in store for us; immorality is actually more common than one would think." (380)
"For what we believe to be our love, or our jealousy, is not one single passion, continuous and indivisible. They are composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, which are ephemeral but by their uninterrupted multitude give the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity. The life is Swann's love, the faithfulness of his jealousy, we're formed of the death, the faithlessness, of numberless desires, numberless doubts, all of which had Odette as their object." (386)
This one reminds me a little of Hopscotch, with its motif of failure of words, though Swann's Way does not take such a negative view, haha.
"I had no greater desire than to see a storm at sea, not so much because it would be a beautiful spectacle as because it would be a moment of nature's real life unveiled; or rather for me there were no beautiful spectacles except the ones which I knew were not artificially contrived for my pleasure, but we're necessary, unchangeable--the beauties of landscapes or of great art...And so that the storm would be absolutely real, I also wanted the shore itself to be a natural shore, not a pier recently built by some municipality. In fact, because of all the feelings it awakened in me, nature seemed to me the thing most opposite to the productions of men. The less it bore their imprint the more room it offered in which my heart could expand." (400)
"How much more individuality still did they assume from being designated by names, names that were theirs alone, proper names like the names people have. Words present us with little pictures of things, clear and familiar, like those that are hung in walls of schools to give children an example if what a workbench is, a bird, an anthill, things conceived of as similar to all others of the same sort. But names present a confused image of people--and of towns, which they accustom us to believe are individual, unique like people--an image which derives from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the color with which it is painted uniformly, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, because of the limitations of the process used or by a whim of the designer, not only the sky and the sea are blue or red, but the boats, the church, the people in the streets." (404)
This one deserves a spoiler alert (it's the last line of the novel) but I really wanted to include it:
"The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situateem for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but a regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years." (444)
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