A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that a knowledgeable reader can discern the quality of an author's writing from just a small sample of their work.
In this quote, Marcel Proust emphasizes the idea that a skilled and educated reader can assess an author's literary ability through a brief encounter with their text. This highlights the deep connection between language, style, and the impact it has on an audience, suggesting that true literary merit can be evaluated quickly by those with an understanding of literary nuances.
In practice
In a discussion about literature at a book club.
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows; how small a thing her charm was for him now compared with the astounding terror that extended out from it like a murky halo, the immense anguish of not knowing at every moment what she had been doing, of not possessing her everywhere and always!
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.
A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.
We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
If certain books are to be termed 'immigrant fiction,' what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn't agree with me.
The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest printβthe love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.
Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.
I have been attacked in Turkey more for my interviews than for my books. Political polemicists and columnists do not read novels there.
Because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye β¦ I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.
Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.
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