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psychology: my lies ..., like everyone else’s, arose in such an immediate and contingent fashion, in defence of a particular interest, that my mind, fixed on some high ideal, allowed my character to fulfil these ... needs in the dark and did not bother to observe them.

Since sound was for him, before his deafness, the perceptible form which the cause of movement assumed, objects moved now without sound seem to be moved without cause; stripped of all qualities of sound, they display a spontaneous activity, they seem to be alive

on the narrator as a twit:

Saint-Loup’s mistress spoke about all acting celebrities in a tone of ironic superiority, which irritated me because I believed – quite wrongly, as it happened – that it was she who was inferior to them.

the serving-maid lit two candles. Pretending that I could not see very well ..., I took her bare forearm in my hand as if I were guiding it. ... I began to fondle it, then, without a word, I drew her whole body close ... and told her to grope about me for some money.

The central death of the grandmother:

... plunged into that unknown world in which she had already received the blows whose marks I had noticed earlier ... when I saw her hat, her face, her coat thrown into disarray by the hand of the invisible angel with whom she had wrestled.

Bold storytelling techniques:

Two days earlier – to anticipate again before I return to the bedside of my dying grandmother – while we were watching over her dead body ...

In relation to a duel I had fought, ...

Brilliant weirdness:

man, a creature clearly less rudimentary than the sea-urchin or even the whale, nevertheless lacks a certain number of essential organs, and notably possesses none that will serve for kissing. For this absent organ he substitutes his lips, and thus ...

... perhaps manages to achieve a more satisfactory result than if he were reduced to caressing the beloved with a horny tusk.

By effacing all her customary preoccupations and pretensions, the moment preceding sexual pleasure, similar in this respect to the moment that follows death, had restored her rejuvenated features to something like the innocence of earliest childhood.

The Courvoisiers had a less exalted notion of intelligence and, unless one belonged to their world, being intelligent came near to meaning ‘having probably murdered one’s parents’.

his magnificent head, repugnant though it was, far surpassed the heads of all his relatives; he was like an ageing Apollo; but it was as if an olive-greenish, bilious juice was about to seep out of his malevolent mouth.

Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.