13 more characters from The Search

Names, no doubt, are whimsical draughtsmen, giving us of people as well as places sketches so unlike the reality that we often experience a kind of stupor when we have before our eyes, in the place of the imagined, the visible world (which, for that matter, is not the real world, our senses being little more endowed than our imagination with the art of portraiture - so little, indeed that the final and approximately lifelike pictures which we manage to obtain of reality are at least as different from the visible world as that was from the imagined).
~Within a Budding Grove, page 590.

Mme de Cambremer after a strenuous session of music,

her diamond earrings fallen, her headpiece of black grapes

come undone.

Mlle Vinteuil recalling a spell of very hot weather at Montjouvain.

Saniette waiting for thunder that never comes.

The affable Babal Bréauté.

Mme de Marsantes

Gísèle sur la plage à Balbec.

Rosemonde

Octave listening to La Voix Humaine.

Léa

Tomato Twin no. 1

M. Nissim Bernard, understanding resemblance is often only external.

Tomato Twin no. 2

Marie-Antoinette at her first soirée as
Charlus' inheritor, Mlle d'Oloron.

If, in the realm of painting, one portrait makes manifest certain truths concerning volume, light, movement, does that mean that it is necessarily inferior to another completely different portrait of the same person, in which a thousand details omitted in the first are minutely transcribed, from which one would conclude the model was ravishingly beautiful while from the first one would have thought him or her ugly, a fact which maybe of documentary, even of historical importance, but is not necessarily an artistic truth?
~Time Regained, pages 738-739.