Proust Swanns Way Quotes & Sayings

If the ghost that haunts the towns of Ypres and Arras and Albert is the staturory British Tommy, slogging with rifle and pack through its ruined streets to this well-documented destiny 'up the line', then the ghost of Boulogne and Etaples and Rouen ought to be a girl. She's called Elsie or Gladys or Dorothy, her ankles are swollen, her feet are aching, her hands reddened and rough. She has little money, no vote, and has almost forgotten what it feels like to be really warm. She sleeps in a tent. Unless she has told a diplomatic lie about her age, she is twenty-three. She is the daughter of a clergyman, a lawyer or a prosperous businessman, and has been privately educated and groomed to be a 'lady'. She wears the unbecoming outdoor uniform of a VAD or an army nurse. She is on active service, and as much a part of the war as Tommy Atkins. — Lyn Macdonald

The only investable idea I have real confidence in is farming and forestry. My family owns some forest, and now we're closing on a farm. Make the farming more sustainable and the forestry more sustainable, and everyone benefits. — Jeremy Grantham

The consummate pleasure (in eating) is not in the costly flavour, but in yourself. Do you seek for sauce for sweating? — Horace

They've had several conversations since that day in Owings Mills when Bisciotti fired him. "He said at some point we will sit down and have a glass of wine in that new house of yours," Billick said. Billick had the perfect response. "It's the least I can do, because you're paying for it. — Gary Myers

I am not immortal. Faustus and I are the also-ran. — Anne Sexton

Forever and ever, kid, until you're sick and tired of seeing me. — Marie Lu

At such moments Gilberte's plaits used to brush my cheek. They seemed to me, in the fineness of their grain, at once natural and supernatural, and in the strength of their constructed tracery, a matchless work of art, in the composition of which had been used the very grass of Paradise. To a section of them, even infinitely minute, what celestial herbary would I not have given as a reliquary. But since I never hoped to obtain an actual fragment of those plaits, if at least I had been able to have their photograph, how far more precious than one of a sheet of flowers traced by Vinci's pencil! To acquire one of these, I stooped - with friends of the Swanns, and even with photographers - to servilities which did not procure for me what I wanted, but tied me for life to a number of extremely tiresome people. — Marcel Proust

Swann's father, an excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts. Several times in the course of a year I would hear my grandfather tell at table the story, which never varied, of the behaviour of M. Swann the elder upon the death of his wife, by whose bedside he had watched day and night. My grandfather, who had not seen him for a long time, hastened to join him at the Swanns' family property on the outskirts of Combray, and managed to entice him for a moment, weeping profusely, out of the death-chamber, so that he should not be present when the body was laid in its coffin. They took a turn or two in the park, where there was a little sunshine. Suddenly M. Swann seized my grandfather — Marcel Proust

I have never experienced a stressful feeling that wasn't caused by attaching to an untrue thought. Behind every uncomfortable feeling, there's a thought that isn't true for us. — Byron Katie

Destroy or be destroyed-there is no middle way! Let us then be the destroyers! — Mikhail Bakunin

If you don't have finances to jump on opportunites or at least room to support yourself while you're tryin to move into new situations then you can't even evolve. — Curtis Jackson

Please don't. Don't oversimplify everything you've been through like that. You had to feel those awful feelings. You had to face them down
confront your bitterness and pessimism
and decide that you didn't want to be that way anymore. — Rainbow Rowell

I don't choose between my house phone and my mobile. I don't choose between my laptop and my notebook. And I don't intend to choose between my e-reader and my bookshelf. — Sara Sheridan

Cats are the runes of beauty, invincibility, wonder, pride, freedom, coldness, self-sufficiency, and dainty individuality - the qualities of sensitive, enlightened, mentally developed, pagan, cynical, poetic, philosophic, dispassionate, reserved, independent, Nietzschean, unbroken, civilised, master-class men. — H.P. Lovecraft

Once you've been somebody, really, you have a career and you're a nobody anymore, and you're getting older, you're living what's called a state of shame. — Mickey Rourke

I'm a demon. I'm more than half-demon, and that means I can only love one person." He watched me from his pillow. "You. Only you — Tijan