Excerpt from Swann's Way
"For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes when I put out
my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say
'I'm going to sleep.' And half an hour later the thought that it was time
to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which,
I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been
thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading,
but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until myself seemed
actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the
rivalry between François I and Charles V."
Swann's Way, Marcel Proust, p.3
