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"I had for some years considered myself to be Czechoslovakian but, in retrospect, I was too English for that, too Irish to be fully English, and too Slovakian to be in any way Irish. Translation had always got in the way of definition."
p.97
An interesting take on the stranger?
" 'I want to go home,' she said. She put her head against the wall and I felt privy to her sadness. It was, of course, the oldest idea: home. To her it meant silence. I tried to take her arm but she turned away."
p.103
"Always the feeling that they were looking right through me, past me, anxious to be with anybody but themselves. The way they smoked, as if it would never belong to them."
p.171
"It had always been, when Swann was around, the time of evening that promised most brightness. Into the dark lobby. Up the stairs. Past the waterstains on the walls. The air hard with cigarette smoke. Swann would flick a lighter for them to find their way. Through the swinging door. A few heads turned. Swann liked to think that they were already stepping into saloon territory. They stood for the national anthem, then sat against the hard-backed seats and waited for their eyes to adjust. "
p.188
A beautiful description of the threshold of the cinema, of the journey from real to fictive space.
"It startles her, the ease with which she has crossed from one place into another, the landscape wholly alien and yet so much the same."
p.214
"In the hotel glass, a reflection startles her, her grey hair, the bright dress, the shrunken bend of her back. To have come all this way and see herself like this. She pushes back through the revolving doors."
p.343
Confronting the physical manifestation of oneself to enter (see 'shopfront' post)
