Quotes About Guermantes

But you are our equal, if not our superior," the Guermantes seemed, in all their actions, to be saying; and they said it in the nicest way imaginable, in order to be loved and admired, but not to be believed; that one should discern the fictitious character of this affability was what they called being well-bred; to suppose it to be genuine, a sign of ill-breeding.

Prince d'Agrigente or the Prince de Cystria—whose masks of flesh and absent or vulgar intelligence had transformed them into rather ordinary specimens, to the point where I ended up feeling that I had landed on the Guermantes doormat not as upon the supposed threshold but at the terminus of the magic world of names.

Succession to a name is sad like all successions and seems like an usurpation; and the uninterrupted stream of new Princesses de Guermantes would flow until the millennium, the name held from age to age by different women would always be that of one living Princesse de Guermantes, a name that ignored death, that was indifferent to change and heartaches and which would close over those who had worn it like the sea in its serene and immemorial placidity.