“The detachment of M. de Charlus was total. And, seeing that he was merely a spectator, everything was bound to make him pro-German from the moment when, although not truly French, he started living in France. He was very intelligent, and in all countries most of the people are silly; no doubt if he had been living in Germany he would have been equally irritated by the way the German fools defend, passionately and foolishly, an unjust cause; but living in France, he was no less irritated by the passionate and foolish defence of a cause that that was just. The logic of passion, even if it is in the service of the right, is never irrefutable for somebody who is not passionately committed to it.”

(Proust, Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson, pp. 82–83)

“A luncheon which may be difficult, unless you can prevent two of the mail guests revealing to each other that one considers himself a reincarnation of Proust, and another that, though he knows no French, Proust wrote solely for him. It rests with you to steer the conversation away from dangerous subjects, such as cattleyas, light railways, Jews, duchesses and madeleines.

CROQUES MONSIEUR
OR
ALGERIAN RISOTTO

*

PRESSED BEEF OR RÔTI DE VEAU

*

MUSHROOMS AND CELERY

*

PURÉE À LA JANE OR RASPBERRY ICE
WITH CHERRY SAUCE

(from Ruth Lowinsky, More Lovely Food, 1935, The Nonesuch Press, London, pp. 13–14. This particular menu is llustrated with a drawing of “an accumulator jar holding water, goldfish, and a miniature ruined temple, made of wood, painted white” by Thomas Lowinsky.)

“But excuses have no place in art, and intentions count for nothing: at every moment the artist has to listen to his instinct, and it is this that makes art the most real of all things, the most austere school of life, the true last judgment. This book, more laborious to decipher than any other, is also the only one which has been dictated to us by reality, the only one of which the ‘impression’ has been printed in us by reality itself. When an idea – an idea of any kind – is left in us by life, its material pattern, the outline of the impression that it made upon us, remains behind as the token of its necessary truth. The ideas formed by the pure intelligence have no more than a logical, a possible truth, they are arbitrarily chosen. The book whose hieroglyphs are patterns not traced by us is the only book that really belongs to us.”

(Proust, Time Regained, trans. Andreas Mayor & Terence Kilmartin, p. 914)

“And the unity of all the views of a train journey is not established on the basis of the circle itself (whose parts remain sealed), nor on the basis of the thing contemplated, but on a transversal that we never cease to follow, moving ‘from one window to the next.’ For travel does not connect places, but affirms only their difference.”

(Gilles Deleuze, Proust & Signs, trans. Richard Howard, pp. 126–127)

“Disappointment is a fundamental moment of the search or of apprenticeship: in each realm of signs, we are disappointed when the object does not give us the secret we were expecting. And disappointment itself is pluralist, variable according to each line. There are few things that are not disappointing the first time they are seen. For the first time is the time of inexperience; we are not yet capable of distinguishing the sign from the object, and the object interposes and confuses the signs. Disappointment on first hearing Vinteuil, on first meeting Bergotte, on first seeing the Balbec church. And it is not enough to return to things a second time, for voluntary memory and this very return offer disadvantages analogous to those that kept us the first time from freely enjoying the signs (the second stay at Balbec is no less disappointing than the first, from other aspects).

(Gilles Deleuze, Proust & Signs, trans. Richard Howard, p. 34)

“And sometimes an hour of sleep is a paralytic stroke after which we must regain the use of our limbs, learn to speak again. Will is not enough. We have slept too long, we have ceased to exist. Waking is barely experienced, without consciousness, as a pipe might experience the turning-off of a tap. This is followed by a life more inanimate than that of a jelly-fish; one might think one had been dredged up from the depths of the sea, or released from prison, if one could think anything at all. But then the goddess Mnemotechne leans out from heaven and offers us, in the form of ‘habit of calling for coffee’, the hope of resurrection. But the sudden gift of memory is not always so simple. One often has at hand, in those first minutes when one is letting oneself slip towards awakening, a range of different realities from which one thinks one can choose, like taking a card from a pack. It is Friday morning and one is coming back from a walk, or else it is tea-time at the seaside. The idea of sleep and that one is in bed in one’s nightshirt is often the last to occur. Resurrection does not come immediately, you think you have rung, you haven’t, you turn over insane ideas in your mind. Movement alone restores thought, and when you have actually pressed the electric bell-push, you can say, slowly but clearly, ‘It must be ten o’clock. Bring me my coffee please, Françoise.’ ”

(Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark, p. 109)

“But ugly, expensive things can be useful: they can impress people who do not understand us, do not share our taste, but with whom we might be in love, more than a difficult object which does not yield up its beauty at once. Now it is precisely and only those people who do not understand us whom it may be useful to impress with possessions, since our intelligence will be enough to win the regard of superior beings.”

(Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark, p. 159)