A journey across influential works of French literature would not be complete without Marcel Proust and his magnum opus, À la recherche du temps perdu, a literary masterpiece that stands in the vaunted halls of literary classics. It is considered by many a literary pundit as one of the best novels of all time and is a familiar presence in literary discourses in the contemporary. The book, however, is not a walk in the park. With an astounding 3,200 page count, it is a labyrinthine work. It is no wonder it is divided into seven volumes which can be read independently. However, when I learned about this, I held back reading the first two of the seven books comprising the novel that I obtained back in 2015. I was able to obtain four more in early 2020, prompting me to start reading the opening books.  

I must say that it was worth the wait. Swann‘s Way was a delight of a read. Sure, it can be complex and perplexing at first but as one finds one’s footing, the story unfolds. One facet that also caught my attention was the beauty of Proust’s impressionistic writing. He can be verbose but it also produced a lush tapestry. In this quotable quote update, I am sharing lines that captured my interest in Within A Budding Grove, alternatively titled In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, the second volume in the novel.

Do check out my complete review of the second volume of Marcel Proust’s magnum opus by clicking here.

“When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within us. It radiates towards the beloved object, finds her a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this shock of the repercussion of our own affection which we call the other’s regard for ourselves, and which pleases us more than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.”

~ Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove

“If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one’s dream if one is not to be troubled by them; there is a way of separating one’s dream from one’s life which so often produces good results that I ask myself whether one ought not, at all costs to try it, simply as a preventive, just as certain surgeons make out that we ought, to avoid the risk of appendicitis later on, to have all our appendices taken out when we are children.”

~ Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove

“In the case of the solitary, his seclusion, even when it is absolute and ends only with life itself, has often as its primary cause a disordered love of the crowd, which so far overruled every other feeling that, not being able to win, when he goes out, the admiration of his hall-porter, of the passers-by, of the cabman whom he hails, he prefers not to be seen by them at all, and with that object abandons every activity that would oblige him to go out of doors.”

~ Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove

“The cruel memory is not itself contemporary with the restored picture, it is of another age, it is one of the rare witnesses to a monstrous past. But inasmuch as this past continues to exist, save in ourselves, who have been pleased to substitute for it a miraculous age of gold, a paradise in which all of mankind shall be reconciled, those memories, those letters carry us back to reality, and cannot but make us feel, by the sudden pang they give us, what a long way we have been borne from that reality by the baseless hpes engendered daily while we waited for something to happen.”

~ Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove

“Had I been less firmly resolved upon settling down definitively to work, I should perhaps have made an effort to begin at once. But since my resolution was explicit, since within twenty-four hours, in the empty frame of the following day where everything was so well-arranged because I myself was not yet in it, my good intention would be realized without difficulty, it was better not to start on an evening when I felt ill-prepared. The following days were not, alas, to prove more propitious. But I was reasonable.”

~ Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove

“Love is born, one would like to remain, for whom one loves, the unknown whom she may love in turn, but one has need of her, one requires contact not so much with her body as with her attention, her heart. One slips into a letter some spiteful expression which will force the indifferent reader to ask for some little kindness in compensation, and love, following an unvarying procedure, sets going with an alternating movement the machinery in which one can no longer either refrain from loving or to be loved.”

~ Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove

“When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within us. It radiates towards the beloved object, finds her a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this shock of the repercussion of our own affection which we call the other’s regard for ourselves, and which pleases us more than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.”

~ Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove

“This is not to say that a genuine love, if we have one, cannot survive in such conditions. But we feel so unmistakably, as though in a new atmosphere, that unknown pressures have altered the dimensions of that sentiment that we can no longer consider it in the old way. It is indeed still there and we shall find it, but in a different place, no longer weighing upon us, satisfied by the sensation which the present affords it, a sensation that is sufficient for us, since for what is not ctually present we take no thought. Unfortunately, the coefficient which thus alters our values alters them only in the hour of intoxication.”

~ Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove

“So it is that a well-read man will at once begin to yawn with boredom when one speaks to him of a new “good book,” because he imagines a sort of composite of all the good books that he has read, whereas a good book is something special, something unforeseeable, and is made up not of the sum of all previous masterpieces but of something which the most thorough assimilation of every one of them would not enable him to discover, since it exists not in their sum but beyond it. Once he has become acquainted with this new work, the well-read man, however jaded his palate, feels his interest awaken in the reality which it depicts.”

~ Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove

“When we withdraw from the pain in which our pride lies a small quantity of the willpower which we have weakly allowed to exhaust itself with increasing age, when we add to the pain that holds our suffering a physical pain which we have acquired and have let grow, then instead of the courageous solution that would have carried the day at one-and-twenty, it is the other grown too healthy and insufficiently balanced that crushes us down at fifty.”

~ Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove

“At the start of a new love as its ending, we are not exclusively attached to the object of that love, but rather the desire to love from which it will presently arise (and, later on, the memory it leaves behind) wanders voluptuously through a zone of interchangeable charms – simply natural charms, it may be, gratification of appetite, enjoyment of one’s surroundings – which are harmonious enough for it not to feel at a loss in the presence of any one of them.”

~ Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove

“For one cannot have a perfect knowledge, one cannot effect the complete absorption of a person who disdains one, so long as one has not overcome her disdain. And since, whenever the idea of women who are so different from us penetrates our senses, unless we are able to forget it or the competition of other ideas eliminates it, we know no rest until we have converted those aliens into something that is compatible with ourself, our heart being in this respect endowed with the same kind of reaction activity as our physical organism, which cannot abide the infusion of any foreign body into its veins without at once striving to digest and assimilate it.”

~ Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove

“Grief that is caused once by a person with whom one is in love can be bitter, even when it is interpolated among preoccupations, occupations, pleasures in which that person is not directly involved and from which our attention is diverted only now and again to return to it. But when such a grief has its own birth – as was now happening – at a moment when the happiness of seeing that person fills us with the exclusion of all else, the sharp depression that then affects our spirits, sunny hitherto, sustained and calm, lets loose in us a raging tempest against which we know not whether we are capable of struggling in the end.”

~ Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove

“Faced with the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as the world’s first natural philosophers must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, before their science had been elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown. Or, worse still, we are like a person in whose mind the law of causality barely exists, a person who would be incapable, therefore, of establishing a connexion between one phenomenon and another and to whose eyes the spectacle of the world would appear as unstable as a dream.”

~ Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove