64
" It is no doubt the existence of our body, similar for us to a vase in which our spirituality is enclosed, that induces us to suppose that all our inner goods, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession. Perhaps this is as inaccurate as to believe that they escape or return. At all events, if they do remain inside us, it is for most of the time in an unknown domain where they are of no service to us, and where even the most ordinary of them are repressed by memories of a different order, which exclude all simultaneity with them in our consciousness. But if the framework of sensations in which they are preserved be recaptured, they have in their turn the same capacity to expel all that is incompatible with them, to install in us, on its own, the self that experienced them. "
― Marcel Proust , Sodom and Gomorrah
65
" Albertine, sentada à minha frente e vendo que chegara a seu destino, deu alguns passos do fundo do vagão onde estávamos e abriu a portinhola. Mas esse movimento, que ela assim fazia para descer, me dilacerava intoleravelmente o coração, como se, ao contrário da posição independente de meu corpo, que a dois passos dele parecia ocupar o de Albertine, tal separação espacial, que um desenhista verídico seria forçado a figurar entre nós, não passasse de uma aparência, e como se, para quem quisesse redesenhar as coisas conforme a realidade verdadeira, fosse preciso agora colocar Albertine, não a certa distância de mim, mas dentro de mim. Ela me fazia tanto mal ao se afastar que, agarrando-a, puxei-a desesperadamente pelo braço. "
― Marcel Proust , Sodom and Gomorrah
75
" M. de Charlus did not go as far as this, but he assumed the frosty, offended expression that women who are not loose have when people appear to think that they are, and even more the women who are so. Moreover, the invert brought face-to-face with an invert sees not simply a displeasing image of himself which, purely inanimate, could injure only his self-esteem, but another himself, alive, active in the same direction, and capable therefore of injuring him in his amours. "
― Marcel Proust , Sodom and Gomorrah