Sodom And Gomorrah Proust Quotes

It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.

But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey.

Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything, the brain emptied of that past which was life until then. And perhaps it is more wonderful still when our landing at the waking-point is abrupt and the thoughts of our sleep, hidden by a cloak of oblivion, have no time to return to us gradually, before sleep ceases. Then, from the black storm through which we seem to have passed (but we do not even say we), we emerge prostrate, without a thought, a we that is void of content.

...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.

...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.

Parties of this sort are as a rule premature. They have little reality until the following day, when they occupy the attention of the people who were not invited.

I felt that I did not really remember her except through the pain, and I longed for the nails that riveted her to my consciousness to be driven yet deeper.

His nature was really like a sheet of paper that has been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten it out.

The theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations.

M. de Charlus made no reply and looked as if he had not heard, which was one of his favourite forms of rudeness.

...the seaside life and the life of travel made me realise that the theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations.

It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.

We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence.

The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome.

Hence one meets in polite society few novelists, or poets, few of all those sublime creatures who speak of the things that are not to be mentioned.

There was a time when my ancestors were proud of the title of chamberlain or butler to the King," said the Baron. "There was also a time," replied Morel haughtily, "when my ancestors cut off your ancestors' heads.

Unfortunately, in the social as in the political world, the victims are such cowards that one cannot for long remain indignant with their executioners.

As by an electric current that gives us a shock, I have been shaken by my loves, I have lived them, I have felt them: never have I succeeded in seeing or thinking them.

After a certain age, and even if we develop in quite different ways, the more we become ourselves, the more our family traits are accentuated.

As profession recognizes profession, so, too, does vice.

حسّ گذرایی همه چیز که موجب می‌شود بخواهیم همه کارمان به نتیجه بیانجامد منظرۀ هر عشقی را رقت‌انگیز می‌کند

When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy.

A man who, night after night, falls like a lump of lead upon his bed, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will such a man ever dream of making, I do not say great discoveries, but even minute observations upon sleep? He barely knows that he does sleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. A memory without fault is not a very powerful incentive to studying the phenomena of memory.

بخشی از خستگی‌های حتی بسیار واقعی، بویژه نزد آدمهای عصبی، به توجه بستگی دارد و فقط حافظه از آن نگهداری می‌کند. همین که از خستگی می‌ترسیم احساس خستکی می‌کنیم و برای رفعش همین بس که از یادش ببریم

...the rule among the human race – a rule that naturally admits of exceptions – is that the reputedly hard are the weak whom nobody wanted, and that the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that gentleness which the vulgar herd mistakes for weakness.

Composers were warned not to strain the attention of their audience, as though we had not at our disposal different degrees of attention, among which it rests precisely with the artist himself to arouse the highest. For those who yawn with boredom after ten lines of a mediocre article have journeyed year after year to Bayreuth to listen to the Ring.

I remained serious. For one thing, I thought it stupid of her to appear to believe or to wish other people to believe that nobody, really, was as smart as herself. For another thing, people who laugh so heartily at what they themselves have said, when it is not funny, dispense us accordingly, by taking upon themselves the responsibility for the mirth, from joining in it.

...infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyse mechanisms of which otherwise we should know nothing. A man who falls straight into bed night after night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, I don't say great discoveries, but even minor observations about sleep. He scarcely knows that he is asleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. An unfailing memory is not a very powerful incentive to the study of the phenomena of memory.

Then came the deglutition of saliva, and the old lady instinctively wiped the stubble of her toothbrush moustache with her handkerchief.

It's far more difficult to disfigure a great work of art than to create one.

E seus olhares aliciantes, aumentados pelos seus sorrisos, não eram mais contidos pelos vidros dos óculos e transbordavam por todos os lados.

This rubicund youth, with his blunt features, appeared for all the world to have a tomato instead of a head.

But for the invert vice begins, not when he establishes a relationship (for too many reasons may govern that), but when he takes his pleasure with women.

I never much like thus being told without possibility of reply what I am to think about people whom I know.

Omul visează mult despre rai, sau mai degrabă desper numeroase raiuri succesive, dar toate sunt chiar înainte de a muri niște paradisuri pierdute sau în care s-au simțit pierduți.

انسان بسیار هوشمند کمتر از احمق به حماقت دیگران توجه نشان می‌دهد

هر خطای برطرف شده آدمی را از حس تازه‌ای برخوردا می‌کند

واقعی با امکان‌های پنهان ماندن سازگاری دارد، تا زمانی که شرایطی این امکان‌ها را از آن بگیرد

اهل هر صنفی زود همدیگر را می‌شناسند، اهل هر عیبی همچنین

گاهی آینده در درون ماست بی آن که خود بدانیم، و گفته‌هایی از ما که دروغ انگاشته می‌شود از واقعیتی در آینده نزدیک خبر می‌دهد

And then one goes on to the next. Because love is all rot, you know

عیب‌های یک آشنای ساده، یا حتی یک دوست، زهرایی واقعی‌اند که خوشبختانه خود را در برابرشان به روش ذره ذره با همان زهر مصون کرده‌ایم

از همه‌ی پنهان‌گری‌ها خطرناک‌تر، اختفای خطا در ذهن خطاکارست.

از شکل انداختن یک شاهکار خیلی از ساختن‌اش مشکل‌تر است

کمی بیخوابی برای شناخت ارزش و مفهوم خواب، برای تابانیدن اندک روشنایی به این تاریکی، بیفایده نیست. حافظۀ بی‌خلل انگیزۀ چندان نیرومندی برای بررسی پدیده‌های حافظه نیست

کار ذهنن تا زمانی که مطیع واقعیت نیست آسان است

Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chooses the person one loves after endless deliberation and on the strength of diverse qualities and advantages.

We ought never to lose our tempers with people who, when we find them at fault, begin to snigger. They do so not because they are laughing at us, but because they are afraid of our displeasure.

(...) emprestando-lhe formas encantadoras de simplicidade, de aparente franqueza, e até de uma altivez independente que parecia inspirada pelo desinteresse. Isso era falso, mas a vantagem da atitude estava bem mais a favor de Morel, considerando-se que, enquanto aquele que ama está sempre forçado a voltar à carga, a insistir, pelo contrário, é fácil ao que não ama seguir uma linha reta, inflexível e graciosa.

We passionately long for there to be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years, we are unfaithful to what we once were, to what we wished to remain immortally. Even without supposing that death is to alter us more completely than the changes that occur in the course of our lives, if in that other life we were to encounter the self that we have been, we should turn away from ourselves as from those people with whom we were once on friendly terms but whom we have not seen for years… We dream much of a paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost too.

I concluded all the same from this first evening that his [Morel's] must be a vile nature, that he would not shrink from any act of servility if the need arose, and was incapable of gratitude. In which he resembled the majority of mankind.

There is no need, in order to explain three-quarters of the opinions held about people, to go so far as a love that has been spurned or an exclusion from political power. Our judgment remains unsure: an invitation refused or received determines it.

In the case of Albertine, I felt that I should never discover anything, that, out of that tangled mass of details of fact and falsehood, I should never unravel the truth: and that it would always be so, unless I were to shut her up in prison (but prisoners escape) until the end.

É muita vez apenas por falta de espírito criador que não se vai bastante longe no sofrimento. E a realidade mais terrível dá, ao mesmo tempo que o sofrimento, a alegria de uma bela descoberta, porque não faz senão dar uma forma nova e clara ao que ruminávamos desde muito sem o saber.

Muitas vezes, é unicamente por falta de espírito criador que não se vai muito longe no sofrimento. E a mais terrível realidade nos concede, ao mesmo tempo que o sofrimento, a alegria de uma bela descoberta, porque só faz doar uma forma clara e nova ao que ruminávamos há muito sem desconfiar.

He lives at Balbec?” crooned the Baron in a tone so far from interrogatory that it is regrettable that the written language does not possess a sign other than the question mark to end such apparently unquestioning remarks. It is true that such a sign would be of little use except to M. de Charlus.

Soon, what was tedious was everything. 'Beautiful things, they're so tedious! Paintings, they're enough to drive you mad...How right you are, it's so tedious, writing letters!' In the end it was life itself that she declared to us was a bore, without one quite knowing from where she was taking her term of comparison.

...Swann had, as he shook the Marquise's hand, seen her bosom from close to and from above, he plunged an attentive, serious, absorbed, almost anxious, gaze into the depths of her corsage, and his nostrils, intoxicated by the woman's perfume, quivered like a butterfly ready to go and settle on the half-glimpsed flower.

É singular que certa ordem de atos secretos tenha como consequência exterior um mode de falar ou gesticular que os revela.

His [Morel's] nature was really like a sheet of paper that has been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten it out.

For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart.

Ψυχή που δεν την αγγίζουν οι ματαιότητες, δεν τη συγκινούν οι φιλοφρονήσεις

But I had long since ceased trying to extract from a woman the square root of her unknown, as it were, which did not often survive a simple introduction.

We dream a great deal of paradise, or, rather, of numerous successive paradises, but they are all, long before we die, paradises lost, in which we would feel lost.

But, don’t you see, since we happened to have M. de Cambremer here, and he is a Marquis, while you are only a Baron. . . . ” “Pardon me,” M. de Charlus replied with an arrogant air to the astonished Verdurin, “I am also Duc de Brabant, Damoiseau de Montargis, Prince d’Oloron, de Carency, de Viareggio and des Dunes. However, it is not of the slightest importance. Please do not distress yourself,” he concluded, resuming his subtle smile which spread itself over these final words: “I could see at a glance that you were not accustomed to society.

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.

Talvez cada noite aceitemos o risco de viver, durante o sono, sofrimentos que consideramos nulos e não acontecidos, porque serão suportados no decurso de um sono que julgamos sem consciência.

In point of fact, we always discover after the event that our adversaries had a reason for taking the side they do take, and one that does not depend on the degree to which that side is in the right, and that those who think as we do have been constrained to do so by, if their moral nature is too contemptible to be invoked, intelligence, and if they have no great acumen, uprightness.

...As for all the little people who call themselves Marquis de Cambremerde or de Gotoblazes, there is no difference between them and the humblest rookie in your regiment. Whether you go and do wee-wee at the Countess Cack's or cack at the Baroness Wee-wee's, it's exactly the same, you will have compromised your reputation and have used a shitty rag instead of toilet paper. Which is unsavoury.

Often, when, in the hall of the casino, two girls felt desire for each other, there was produced something like a phenomenon of light, a sort of trail of phosphorescence leading from one to the other.

The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams. And besides, a fresh reality will perhaps make us forget, detest even, the desires on account of which we set out on our journey.

think I would be lying if I said that the painful and perpetual mistrust that Albertine was to inspire in me had already begun, let alone the particular, above all Gomorran, character which that mistrust was to assume.

but the pleasures that we have chosen can be a long way off if their advent is certain and if, while we await them, we can give ourselves over in the meantime to an idle seeking to attract and to an incapacity for love.

A peculiarity of love, moreover, is that it makes us at once more mistrustful and more credulous, makes us quicker to suspect the one we love than we would have another woman, and to be readier to lend credence to her denials.

You know,” I said to her as we got back into the carriage, “the life of a resort and the life of travel make me realize that the theater of the world has fewer sets at its disposal than actors, and fewer actors than ‘situations.

So as not to see anything any more, I turned towards the wall, but alas, what was now facing me was that partition which used to serve us as a morning messenger, that partition which, as responsive as a violin in rendering every nuance of a feeling, reported so exactly to my grandmother my fear at once of waking her and, if she were already awake, of not being heard by her and so of her not coming, then immediately, like a second instrument taking up the melody, informing me of her coming and bidding me be calm. I dared not put out my hand to that wall, any more than to a piano on which my grandmother had been playing and which still vibrated from her touch. I knew that I might knock now, even louder, that nothing would wake her any more, that I should hear no response, that my grandmother would never come again. And I asked nothing more of God, if a paradise exists, than to be able, there, to knock on that wall with the three little raps which my grandmother would recognize among a thousand, and to which she would give those answering knocks which meant: "Don't fuss, little mouse, I know you're impatient, but I'm coming," and that he would let me stay with her throughout eternity, which would not be too long for the two of us.

I understood for the first time that the fixed, tearless gaze (which meant that Françoise felt little pity for her) that she had had since my grandmother’s death had been dwelling on this incomprehensible contradiction between memory and nothingness.

Mme Verdurin asked him: "Did you have some of my orangeade?" Whereupon M. de Charlus, with a gracious smile, in a crystalline tone which he rarely adopted, and with endless simperings and wrigglings of the hips, replied: "No, I preferred its neighbour, which is strawberry-juice, I think. It's delicious."[...]But on hearing M. de Charlus say, in that shrill voice and with that smile and those gestures, "No, I preferred its neighbour, the strawberry-juice," one could say: "Ah, he likes the stronger sex,"[...]

if the eyes are sometimes the organ in which intelligence is revealed, the nose (whatever their intimate solidarity and the unsuspected repercussions of one feature on the others), the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity exhibits itself the most readily.

to suppose that it formed part of a vast and enduring happiness that had appeared to me at this point alone; and, so that the following day might not give the lie to this pretense, not to try to demand a further favor following that which had been due only to the artifice of an exceptional moment.

In actual fact, I had not imagined there to have been anything sensual, or even sentimental, in the Baron’s offers. I had said that to my parents out of sheer foolishness. But the future sometimes dwells in us without our knowing it, and the words thought to be untruthful describe an imminent reality.

Love can thus be responsible for veritable geological upheavals of the mind. In that of M. de Charlus, which a few days earlier had resembled a plain so uniform that as far as the eye could reach it would have been impossible to make out an idea rising above the level surface, there had suddenly sprung into being, hard as stone, a range of mountains, but mountains as elaborately carved as if some sculptor, instead of quarrying and carting away the marble, had chiselled it on the spot, in which there writhed in vast titanic groups Fury, Jealousy, Curiosity, Envy, Hatred, Suffering, Pride, Terror and Love.

E recomecei a escutar, a sofrer; quando estamos à espera, do ouvido que recolhe os ruídos ao espírito que os despoja e analisa, e do espírito ao coração a quem ele transmite os seus resultados, tão rápido é o duplo trajeto que nem sequer lhe podemos perceber a duração, e parece estarmos escutando diretamente com o nosso coração.

No doubt I had long been prepared, by virtue of the sway exercised over my imagination and my ability to be moved by the example of Swann, to believe that what I feared was true, instead of what I would have wished for. Thus the comfort brought by Albertine’s affirmations was all but compromised for a moment because I recalled the story of Odette.

But the second kind seek out the women who love women, who can procure a young man for them and add to the pleasure which they get from finding themselves with him; much more, they can, in the same way, find the same pleasure with them as with a man. [...] For in the relationships they have with them, they play the role of another woman for the women who love women, and the woman offers them at the same time more or less what they find in a man, so that the jealous friend suffers from feeling that the man he loves is inseparable from the woman who is for him almost a man, at the same time as he feels him almost escaping from him, because, for these women, he is something he does not know, a sort of woman.

Albertine, sentada à minha frente e vendo que chegara a seu destino, deu alguns passos do fundo do vagão onde estávamos e abriu a portinhola. Mas esse movimento, que ela assim fazia para descer, me dilacerava intoleravelmente o coração, como se, ao contrário da posição independente de meu corpo, que a dois passos dele parecia ocupar o de Albertine, tal separação espacial, que um desenhista verídico seria forçado a figurar entre nós, não passasse de uma aparência, e como se, para quem quisesse redesenhar as coisas conforme a realidade verdadeira, fosse preciso agora colocar Albertine, não a certa distância de mim, mas dentro de mim. Ela me fazia tanto mal ao se afastar que, agarrando-a, puxei-a desesperadamente pelo braço.

The images chosen by memory are as arbitrary, as confined, and as elusive as those that imagination had formed and that reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, outside of us, a real place should possess the pictures painted by memory rather than those of our dreams. Besides, a new reality will perhaps make us forget, or even detest, the desires on whose account we had come away.

It is no doubt the existence of our body, similar for us to a vase in which our spirituality is enclosed, that induces us to suppose that all our inner goods, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession. Perhaps this is as inaccurate as to believe that they escape or return. At all events, if they do remain inside us, it is for most of the time in an unknown domain where they are of no service to us, and where even the most ordinary of them are repressed by memories of a different order, which exclude all simultaneity with them in our consciousness. But if the framework of sensations in which they are preserved be recaptured, they have in their turn the same capacity to expel all that is incompatible with them, to install in us, on its own, the self that experienced them.

Pelo menos esses despertares, tal como os acabo de descrever, e que eram na maior parte do tempo os meus depois que eu havia jantado na Raspelière, tudo se passava como se assim fosse, e eu posso testemunhá-lo, eu, o estranho humano, que, esperando que a morte o liberte, vive com as persianas fechadas, nada sabe do mundo, permanece imóvel como um mocho e, como este, só vê com alguma nitidez nas trevas.

E depois, como tinha sobre a nobreza e a natureza dos nomes com que se formam os títulos as noções muito vagas que são as de muita gente que não é ascensorista , tanto mais verossímil lhe parecera o nome de Camembert porque, sendo esse queijo universalmente conhecido, não era de espantar que se tirasse um marquesado de tão glorioso renome, a menos que não fosse o marquesado que emprestara sua celebridade ao queijo.

I should have left that evening without ever seeing her again. I had a presentiment from then on that in a love that is not shared—or, in other words, in love, for there are people for whom there is no shared love—all we can taste of happiness is that simulacrum which had been granted me at one of those unique moments when a woman’s kindness, or her caprice, or chance applies to our desires, in a perfect coincidence, the same words and the same actions as if we had truly been loved.

my mother had plunged me into that state of doubt in which I had been already when, my father having given me permission to go to Phèdre, and above all to become a man of letters, I had suddenly felt too heavy a responsibility, the fear of upsetting him, and the melancholy that comes when we cease to obey orders that, day by day, hide the future from us, and realize that we have at last begun to live life in earnest, as a grown-up person, to live the one life of which each of us is free to dispose. It

But a remark made by the woman we love does not preserve its purity for long; it spoils, it goes bad. One or two evenings later, Albertine’s words came back to me, and what they seemed to signify was no longer the bad upbringing that was a source of pride to her—and which could but make me smile—but something else, and that Albertine, perhaps even without any precise object, in order to excite the woman’s senses or to remind her mischievously of earlier propositions, accepted perhaps in the old days, had brushed quickly against her, had thought that I had perhaps found out about it, since it had been done in public, and had wanted to forestall an unfavorable interpretation.

And since he was inclined himself to the kind of irritating pretentiousness that he disapproved of—“What was the point of ‘turning on the charm’ for them so persistently if you don’t want to meet them again?”—I turned down his proposal, because I did not want to risk being parted from Albertine, but also because I was now detached from them. From them, that is to say, from myself. We desire passionately that there should be another life in which we would be similar to what we are here below. But we do not reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, but in this one, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we had wanted to remain immortally.

In the great game of “hide-and-seek” played out in the memory when we are trying to recover a name, there is not a series of graduated approximations. We can see nothing; then, all of a sudden, the exact name appears, and quite different from what we thought we could divine. It is not it that has come to us. No, I believe, rather, that, as we go on through life, we spend our time distancing ourselves from the zone where a name is distinct, and that it was by the exercise of my will and my attention, which enhanced the acuity of my inward gaze, that I had suddenly penetrated the semidarkness and seen clearly. At all events, if there are transitions between forgetfulness and memory, those transitions are unconscious.

But these recurrences of desire force us to reflect that, if we wanted to meet these girls again with the same pleasure, we should have also to go back to the year in question, which has since been followed by ten others, in the course of which the girl has faded. We can sometimes find a person again, but not abolish time. All this up until that unforeseen day, sad as a winter’s night, when we are no longer seeking that particular girl, or any other, and when to find one would alarm us even. For we no longer feel we have sufficient attractions to please, or the strength to love. Not, of course, that we are, in the true sense of the word, impotent. So far as love is concerned, we would love more than ever. But we feel that it is too great an undertaking for the little strength that we preserve. Our eternal rest has already introduced intervals, in which we cannot go out, cannot speak.

E eu entrava no sono, o qual é como um segundo apartamento que possuíssemos e onde, abandonando o nosso, tivéssemos ido dormir. Tem campainhas próprias e ali somos algumas vezes violentamente despertados por um toque de campainha, perfeitamente ouvido por nossos ouvidos, quando no entanto ninguém tocou. Tem seus criados, seus visitantes particulares que nos vêm procurar para sairmos, de maneira que estamos prontos para levantar-nos, quando nos é forçoso verificar, com a nossa quase imediata transmigração para o outro apartamento, o da véspera, que o quarto está vazio, que ninguém chegou. A raça que o habita, como a dos primeiros humanos, é andrógina. Um homem aparece ao cabo de um instante sob o aspecto de uma mulher. As coisas têm tendência a tornar-se homens, os homens amigos e inimigos. O tempo que decorre para o adormecido, durante esse sono, é absolutamente diferente do tempo em que transcorre a vida do homem acordado. Ora o seu curso é muito mais rápido, um quarto de hora parece um dia, ora muito mais longo e julga-se haver apenas dormido um ligeiro sono quando se dormiu o dia inteiro. Então, sobre o carro do sono, desce às profundezas onde a recordação não mais pode alcançá-lo, e para aquém das quais foi o espírito obrigado a desandar caminho.

to tease out the fictitious nature of this amiability was to have been what they called well brought up; to believe that amiability to be real was to lack breeding. I received, as it happens, a short time after this, a lesson that finally taught me, with the most perfect exactitude, the extent and limits of certain forms of aristocratic amiability. It was at a matinée given by the Duchesse de Montmorency23 for the Queen of England; a sort of small cortège had formed to go to the buffet, at the head of which walked the sovereign with, on her arm, the Duc de Guermantes. This was the moment of my own arrival. With his free hand, the Duc made, from a good forty meters away, innumerable gestures of summons and of friendship, which seemed to be saying that I could approach without fear, that I would not be eaten alive in place of the sandwiches. But, I, who was beginning to become word perfect in the language of the courts, instead of moving even a single step closer, gave a deep bow from my forty meters of distance, but without smiling, as I would have done faced with someone I hardly knew, then continued on my way in the opposite direction. I might have written a masterpiece, and the Guermantes would have done me less honor than for this bow. It did not go unobserved by the eyes either of the Duc, even though he had to respond to more than five hundred people that day, or of the Duchesse, who, having met my mother, recounted it to her, and, while being careful not to say that I had been in the wrong, that I should have gone up, told her that her husband had marveled at my bow, that it would have been impossible to make it any more expressive