21
" For indeed, did not my choosing and falling in love with Albertine, despite all the denials of my reason, entail knowing Albertine in all her vileness? And even in the moments when our mistrust recedes, is love not its prolongation and its transformation? Is love not a proof of clear-sightedness (a proof unintelligible to the lover himself) since desire, always seeking what is most opposite to us, forces us to love what makes us suffer? The charm of a person, of her eyes, her mouth and her figure, certainly also contains just those elements which, unbeknown to ourselves, are most likely to make us unhappy, so that to feel ourselves drawn toward this person, to start to love her, is, however innocent we claim her to be, already to start reading between the lines all her misdeeds, all her betrayals. "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva
23
" Yet as soon as he acquired his social position, he ceased to take advantage of it. It was not merely because once he was an official guest he no longer experienced any pleasure at being invited, but also, because of the two vices which had competed so long within him, the least natural, snobbery, gave way to the other, more natural one, since it marked a return, however devious, to nature. "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva
25
" Perhaps, I thought, it was Albertine’s vice itself, the cause of my later suffering, which had produced in Albertine her frank and generous manner, creating the illusion that one enjoyed with her the same loyal and unrestrained camaraderie as with a man, just as a parallel vice had produced in M. de Charlus a feminine subtlety of wit and sensibility. In the midst of the most utter blindness, our perspicacity subsists in the very guise of predilection and tenderness, so that it is wrong in love to talk of a bad choice, since, as soon as there is a choice, it can be only a bad one. "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva
26
" And yet, however much joy her return might give me when it happened, I felt that the same difficulties would soon arise again and that seeking happiness through satisfying my inner desires was as naïve as undertaking to reach the horizon by simply walking forward in a straight line. The more desire advances, the more true possession recedes. So that if it is possible to obtain happiness, or at least freedom from suffering, what we should seek is not the satisfaction, but the gradual reduction and final elimination of desire. We try to see those we love, we should try not to see them, for only the process of forgetting leads finally to the extinction of desire. And I imagine that if an author wanted to express this kind of truth, he would seek to approach the woman concerned by dedicating his book to her, saying, “This is your book. "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva
27
" (which was a mistake, for the value of an aristocratic title, like that of a share quoted on the stock exchange, rises when in demand and falls when on offer. Everything we believe imperishable tends toward destruction; a social position, like everything else, is not given once and for all but, just like the power of an empire, is reconstituted from moment to moment through a sort of endless renewed process of creation, which explains the apparent anomalies of social or political history over half a century. The creation of the world did not happen “in the beginning,” it happens from day to day. The Marquise de Saint-Loup thought, “I am the Marquise de Saint-Loup,” in the knowledge that the night before she had turned down three invitations to dine with duchesses. But if to a certain extent her name enhanced the distinctly un-aristocratic circles which she entertained, by an inverse movement the circles which invited the Marquise devalued the name that she bore. Nothing resists such movements, "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva
28
" once this sequence of emotions and anxieties is forgotten, at least in so far as they attach to her, for they may have reappeared, but attached to somebody else. Before that, when these emotions and anxieties were still attached to her, we believed that our happiness depended upon her person: but it depended only on ending our anxiety. At that time, therefore, our unconscious was more clear-sighted than we were, reducing the beloved figure to such a small size, a figure which we ourselves had perhaps forgotten, which we might have known imperfectly and believed mediocre, in the terrible drama we enacted where our very lives might have depended on tracking her down in order to cease waiting for her. "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva
31
" But the disastrous way in which the psychopathological universe is constructed implies that the clumsy act, the act which we should avoid at all costs, is precisely the act which soothes us, the act which, until we discover its outcome, opens up new prospects of hope for us and momentarily relieves us of the intolerable pain that rejection gave birth to within us, thus it is that when the pain is too strong, we fall into the clumsy error of writing to the person whom we love, or begging someone else to do so, or going to see her, and proving that we cannot do without her. "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva
36
" A mentira é essencial à humanidade. Ela desempenha entre nós um papel tão grande, talvez, quanto o da procura do prazer, e, de resto, é comandada por essa procura. Mentimos para proteger nosso prazer ou nossa honra, se por acaso a divulgação do prazer é contrária à honra. Mentimos durante a vida toda, e sobretudo, e talvez somente, àqueles que nos amam. Só estes, realmente, nos fazem recear a sorte de nosso prazer e desejar-lhes a estima. "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva
38
" My spirits lulled by Albertine’s presence, I had envisaged only a departure arranged by me at an indeterminate date, that is, situated in a timeless zone; and consequently had only imagined that I thought of her departure, in the way that many people who think about death when they are in good health imagine that they do not fear it, and in fact do no more than introduce one purely negative notion into the heart of their good health, which would be precisely what the approach of death would alter. Moreover the idea of a parting planned by Albertine herself could have struck my mind a thousand times over, as clearly and unambiguously as you like, without my having any truer realization of what this departure would mean to me, that is, what it would mean in reality—something original, devastating, unknown, an entirely novel evil. "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva
40
" For Albertine’s death to have suppressed my suffering, the mortal blow would have had to kill her not only in Touraine, but within me. There, she had never been more alive. To enter inside us, people have been obliged to take on the form and to fit into the framework of time; appearing to us only in successive instants, they have never managed to reveal to us more than one aspect, print more than a single photograph of themselves at a time. This is no doubt a great weakness in human beings, to consist in a simple collection of moments; yet a great strength too; they depend on memory, and our memory of a moment is not informed of everything that has happened since, the moment which it registered still lives on and, with it, the person whose form was sketched within it. And then this fragmentation not only makes the dead person live on, it multiplies her forms. In order to console myself, I would have had to forget not one but innumerable Albertines. When I had succeeded in accepting the grief of having lost one of them, I would have to begin again with another, with a hundred others. "
― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva