Words of Wisdom (From In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)

 "Unfortunately for my peace of mind, I was quite unlike all these people: I was greatly concerned about many of them." -261

"Presumably all they wished to show was that, though there might be some things they lacked, such as certain of the old lady's prerogatives and the fact of being acquainted with her, this was not because they could not aspire to them but because they would not. But they had eventually come to convince themselves of the truth of this; and all desire for or curiosity about modes of life unknown to oneself, all hope of ever striking up new friendships, had been negated in these women and supplanted by a feigned disdain, a simulacrum of enjoyment of life, with the untoward effect that they called their displeasure satisfaction and had to lie to themselves all the time, two things that made for their constant unhappiness." -257

"In the evenings, they never dined in the hotel, where the electric fountains gushed their light into the spacious dining room, turning it into an immense and wonderful aquarium, while, invisible in the outer shadows beyond the glass wall, the working classes of Balbec, the fisherman, and even middle-class families pressed against the windows, in an attempt to see the luxurious life of these denizens, glowing amid the golden sway of the eddies, all of it as weird and fascinating for the poor as the existence of strange fish and mollusks (but whether the glass barrier will go on protecting forever the feeding of the marvelous creatures, or whether the obscure onlookers gloating toward them from the outer dark will break into the aquarium and hook them for the pot, therein lies the great social question)."-260

"In the freshest bud, alas, one may read the all-but-imperceptible signs that tell the practiced eye what the future, through the desiccation or fecundation of the flesh in full blossom today, holds for the seed, immutably predestined in form and outcome. We delight in the line of a young nose, as beautiful as a delicate ripple ruffling the surface of the morning sea, seemingly motionless and sketchable, the water being so calm that the rise of the tide is invisible. When we look at faces, they do not appear to be changing, the revolution they are undergoing being so long drawn out as to escape our notice. But to see one of these young girls standing beside her mother or her aunt was to glimpse the remoter reaches of ugliness to which, in response to an inner attraction, the features of most of them would have come less than thirty years later, the time of waning glances, the time when such a face receives no more light and slips forever below the horizon...Even mentally, we depend much more than we believe on natural laws; and our mind, like the humblest plant, the merest grass,contains particularities that we think we have chosen. all we can grasp, though, is the secondary ideas, while the first cause (Jewishness, French family, etc.), which gives rise to the, and which we respond to at a time of its choosing, remains beyond our ken. though we think our thoughts are ours by choice, and our ills a mere consequence of our own recklessly unhealthy life, it may well be that, just as a papilionaceous plants produce a seed of certain shape, our family hands down to us the ideas that keep us alive, as well as the illness that will cause our death." -470

"'But the important thing is not whom one loves,' he exclaimed, in a voice that was authoritative, peremptory, almost cutting. 'The important thing is to love.'" -344

"'You may well be devoid of personal wealth, but in that case you're like nearly everyone else! However, at least for a time you have youth, and youth is always irresistible. Moreover, young man, it is the height of stupidity to think there is something ridiculous or reprehensible in feelings one does not share. I love the night and you say you dread it. I love the scent of roses, yet I have a friend in whom it sets off a fever. Do you suppose that, for me, that makes him a lesser man than I am? I strive to understand everything and do not allow myself to condemn anything....I know how much one can suffer for things others could never understand." -347

"So it was that I came upon a watercolor that must have been date from a much earlier time in the life of Elstir, and which made me feel that particular enchantment one gets from works that are not only painted to perfection, but the subject of which is so singular and delightful that we see it as accounting for much of the charm of the thing, as though the painter only had to notice this charm, study it as it stood before him fully present in the material reality of the natural world, then reproduce it. That such objects can exist, beautiful in themselves and without any painter's interpretation of them, is something that satisfies an innate materialism in us, though resisted by reason, and serves as a counterblanace to the abstractions of aesthetics." -428

"Her hair was golden, as was everything else about her; for, though she had pink cheeks and eyes of blue, they too looked like the colors of morning sky when everything is touched and tinted by the gold of summer sunlight. She went straight to my head." -466