“We believe that we can change the things around us in accordance with our desires—we believe it because otherwise we can see no favourable outcome. We do not think of the outcome which generally comes to pass and is also favourable: we do not succeed in changing things in accordance with our desires, but gradually our desires change. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant to us. We have failed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us beyond it, and then if we turn round to gaze into the distance of the past, we can barely see it, so imperceptible has it become.”
French: À la recherche du temps perdu; Remembrance of Things Past
Author: Marcel Proust
Original title: À la recherche du temps perdu
Country: France
Language: French
Genre: Modernist
Publication date: 1913–1927
Published in English: 1922–1931
Publisher: Grasset and Gallimard
Translators:
C. K. Scott Moncrieff
Stephen Hudson
Terence Kilmartin
Lydia Davis
James Grieve
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