Quotes About Albertine

Pour comprendre le génie de Proust, il faut avoir vécu cela, Albertine disparue. Je revis vraiment La prisonnière et Albertine disparue (La fugitive, comme titre, me plaît moins).

Reading Albertine Disparue

It was fortunate that I had not already yielded to the temptation to break with Albertine; the tedium of having to rejoin her presently, when I went home, was a trifling matter compared with the anxiety that I should have felt if the separation had occurred when I still had a doubt about her and before I had had time to grow indifferent to her.

the harm that Albertine had done me was a last bond between her and myself which outlived memory even, for with the conservation of energy which belongs to everything that is physical, suffering has no need of the lessons of memory.

the sentiments that Albertine had left with me were more difficult to extinguish than the memory of their original cause.

I needed to live with the idea of the death of Albertine, with the idea of her misdeeds, for these ideas to become habitual, that is for me to be able to forget these ideas and finally forget Albertine herself.

And certainly there were many others besides my grandmother and Albertine from whom I had assimilated a word, a glance, but of whom as individual beings I remembered nothing; a book is a great cemetery in which, for the most part, the names upon the tombs are effaced. Sometimes, on the other hand,

For since missing a woman is no more than reviving a love that remains subject to the same laws as all love, the force of my regret was increased by the same causes which, while Albertine was alive, would have augmented my love for her and which had always given pride of place to jealousy and pain.

think I would be lying if I said that the painful and perpetual mistrust that Albertine was to inspire in me had already begun, let alone the particular, above all Gomorran, character which that mistrust was to assume.

And I might, in order to justify myself, have told her that I loved her. But the confession of that love, apart from the fact that it could not have told Albertine anything new, would perhaps have made her colder to myself than the harshness and deceit for which love was the sole excuse. To be harsh and deceitful to the person whom we love is so natural!

But this was not the opinion that I would instinctively have formed when I heard Albertine say: "In any case, whether he's devoted or not, I sincerely hope I shall never see him again, since he's made us quarrel. We must never quarrel again. It isn't nice." I felt, since she had seemed to desire Saint-Loup, almost cured for the time being of the idea that she cared for women, which I had supposed to be incurable.

The sight of Albertine's bare throat, of those too rosy cheeks, had so intoxicated me (that is to say had placed the reality of the world for me no longer in nature, but in the torrent of sensations that I could barely contain) that this sight had destroyed the equilibrium between the immense and indestructible life that circulated in my being and the life of the universe, so puny in comparison.

In order to deploy the means necessary to ensure her return, I was condemned to act once more as if I were not in love with her and were not suffering from her departure, I was condemned to continue lying to her—not that I had ever been very successful with this course of action, but because I had always adopted it since I had been in love with Albertine.

Some of the foodstuffs being sold in the street, which I myself hated, were among Albertine's favorites, so that Françoise sent her kitchen-boy out to buy them, even if he perhaps felt it beneath his dignity to have to mingle in this way with the common herd. The cries sounded clearly in this quiet neighborhood, where noise was no longer a grievance for Françoise, and had become a source of pleasure to me.

These accounts helped my imagination, in after years, to take the line of supposing that Albertine might, instead of being a good girl, have had the same immorality, the same faculty of deception as a reformed prostitute, and I thought of all the sufferings that would in that case have been in store for me had I ever really been her lover

It was certainly not that I loved Albertine in the slightest: I knew that. Perhaps love is nothing but the ripple effect of those disturbances which, in the wake of an emotion, stir up the soul. My whole soul had been profoundly agitated when Albertine had told me, at Balbec, about Mlle Vinteuil, but these disturbances were over now. I no longer loved Albertine, for nothing remained of the pain, now cured,