The Captive and The Fugitive

We are wrong in speaking of a bad choice in love, since as soon as there is a choice it can only be bad

The blonde one darts a furtive glance at me. I conclude from what the concierge tells me that she is Mlle d’Éporcheville, whose favors Robert enjoyed in a brothel

geometry in space, so there is a psychology in time. My love is not so much a love for Albertine as a love in me. It is a tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind

And it was I who, having been incapable of understanding this, having failed to recapture the impression until much later in my memory after an interval in which, as a result of my conversations, a dividing hedge of sentiment had made them afraid to be as frank as in the first moments, had ruined everything by my clumsiness

Rachel in Charlie,26 Gilberte, for her part, sought to present some similarity to Rachel, in order to appear more attractive to her husband, wearing, like her, bows of scarlet or pink or yellow ribbon in her hair, which she dressed in a similar style, for she believed that her husband was still in love with Rachel,

had been the fear of his forming with another cocotte—or perhaps with the same one, for Robert took a long time to forget Rachel—a new attachment that might have been his salvation

For even if one love passes into oblivion, it may determine the form of the love that is to follow it.

Robert’s the satisfaction; in my case to prevent her, by perpetual vigilance, from indulging her predilection; in Robert’s to cultivate it, and by granting her her freedom to make her bring her girlfriends to him

the part played by his memory of Rachel was now purely esthetic. It is indeed improbable that it could have played any othe

My life with Albertine is, when I am not jealous, mere boredom; when I am jealous, constant suffering