“I don’t deny it,” answered Swann in some bewilderment. “The fault I find with our newspapers is that they force us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don’t know; shall we say Pascal’s Pensées?”
–Charles Swann, in Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, the M. Scott Moncrieff translation, edited and annotated by William C. Carter
