“But ever since, more than a year before, discovering to him many of the riches of his own soul, the love of music had, for a time at least, been born in him, Swann had regarded musical motifs as actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadow, unknown, impenetrable to the human mind, but none the less perfectly distinct from one another, unequal among themselves in value and significance.”

“that the musical notes and tones become harmonious through the relation of one with another; and that being before and behind give the idea of one following another.”

“He was the only person I ever met whose soul I could clearly see in his eyes. And I had more faith in him than I've ever had in another human being.”

“The words just sprang into my mind. Maybe I'd never stopped loving Michael, but now it felt different. I loved him despite the injuries we'd inflicted on one another, because of the bad times as well as the good ones..... Our love was richer and bumpier and more complex than it had ever been before.”

“No: that fear had been inside him for manyyears, it had lived with him, it had been another shadow cast over hisown shadow ever since the night he awoke, shaken by a bad dream,and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as hehad always believed, but an immediate reality.”

“It had belonged to that idea of the exasperated consciousness of his victim to become a real test for him; since he had quite put it to himself from the first that, oh distinctly! he could "cultivate" his whole perception. He had felt it as above all open to cultivation--which indeed was but another name for his manner of spending his time. He was bringing it on, bringing it to perfection, by practice; in consequence of which it had grown so fine that he was now aware of impressions, attestations of his general postulate, that couldn't have broken upon him at once.”