All 26 Uses
endeavor
in
Swann's Way
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- The torments inflicted on her by my great-aunt, the sight of my grandmother's vain entreaties, of her in her weakness conquered before she began, but still making the futile endeavour to wean my grandfather from his liqueur-glass—all these were things of the sort to which, in later years, one can grow so well accustomed as to smile at them, to take the tormentor's side with a. happy determination which deludes one into the belief that it is not, really, tormenting; but in those days they filled me with such horror that I longed to strike my great-aunt.†
Chpt 1unconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use endeavor.
- My great-aunt, speaking in a loud voice, to set an example, in a tone which she endeavoured to make sound natural, would tell the others not to whisper so;†
Chpt 1endeavoured = tried or attemptedunconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use endeavored.
- Accordingly, having to reckon again with vulgarity, my grandmother would endeavour to postpone the moment of contact still further.†
Chpt 1 *unconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use endeavor.
- She looked at me and smiled; my uncle said "My nephew!" without telling her my name or telling me hers, doubtless because, since his difficulties with my grandfather, he had endeavoured as far as possible to avoid any association of his family with this other class of acquaintance.†
Chpt 2endeavoured = tried or attemptedunconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use endeavored.
- And since this other, this irrepressible, dominant, despotic Legrandin, if he lacked our Legrandin's charming vocabulary, shewed an infinitely greater promptness in expressing himself, by means of what are called 'reflexes,' it followed that, when Legrandin the talker attempted to silence him, he would already have spoken, and it would be useless for our friend to deplore the bad impression which the revelations of his alter ego must have caused, since he could do no more now than endeavour to mitigate them.†
Chpt 2unconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use endeavor.
- But very soon that love surged up again in me like a reaction by which my humiliated heart was endeavouring to rise to Gilberte's level, or to draw her down to its own.†
Chpt 2endeavouring = trying or attemptingunconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use endeavoring.
- But at the same time I felt that I was in duty bound not to content myself with these unilluminating words, but to endeavour to see more clearly into the sources of my enjoyment.†
Chpt 2unconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use endeavor.
- It may well have been, too, that the smiling moderation with which she faced and answered these blasphemies, that this tender and hypocritical rebuke appeared to her frank and generous nature as a particularly shameful and seductive form of that criminal attitude towards life which she was endeavouring to adopt.†
Chpt 2endeavouring = trying or attemptingunconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use endeavoring.
- And when they allow themselves for a moment to enjoy it they endeavour to impersonate, to assume all the outward appearance of wicked people, for themselves and their partners in guilt, so as to gain the momentary illusion of having escaped beyond the control of their own gentle and scrupulous natures into the inhuman world of pleasure.†
Chpt 2unconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use endeavor.
- I would still find it there, on one walk after another, always in the same helpless state, suggesting certain victims of neurasthenia, among whom my grandfather would have included my aunt Leonie, who present without modification, year after year, the spectacle of their odd and unaccountable habits, which they always imagine themselves to be on the point of shaking off, but which they always retain to the end; caught in the treadmill of their own maladies and eccentricities, their futile endeavours to escape serve only to actuate its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange, ineluctable, fatal daily round.†
Chpt 2endeavours = attempts; or things attemptedunconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use endeavors.
- Meanwhile I was endeavouring to apply to this image, which the prominent nose, the piercing eyes pinned down and fixed in my field of vision (perhaps because it was they that had first struck it, that had made the first impression on its surface, before I had had time to wonder whether the woman who thus appeared before me might possibly be Mme. de Guermantes), to this fresh and unchanging image the idea: "It is Mme. de Guermantes"; but I succeeded only in making the idea pass between me and the image, as though they were two discs moving in separate planes, with a space between.†
Chpt 2endeavouring = trying or attemptingunconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use endeavoring.
- As I felt that the mysterious object was to be found in them, I would stand there in front of them, motionless, gazing, breathing, endeavouring to penetrate with my mind beyond the thing seen or smelt.†
Chpt 2
- Swann would endeavour not to find charm and beauty in the women with whom he must pass time, but to pass his time among women whom he had already found to be beautiful and charming.†
Chpt 3unconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use endeavor.
- On all those points, however, where a plain question appeared to him to be permissible, the Doctor was unsparing in his endeavours to cultivate the wilderness of his ignorance and uncertainty and so to complete his education.†
Chpt 3endeavours = attempts; or things attemptedunconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use endeavors.
- His mind fumbled, for a moment, in the darkness, he took off his spectacles, wiped the glasses, passed his hands over his eyes, but saw no light until he found himself face to face with a wholly different idea, the realisation that he must endeavour, in the coming month, to send Odette six or seven thousand-franc notes instead of five, simply as a surprise for her and to give her pleasure.†
Chpt 3unconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use endeavor.
- Swann had, in fact, reached an age the philosophy of which—supported, in his case, by the current philosophy of the day, as well as by that of the circle in which he had spent most of his life, the group that surrounded the Princesse des Laumes, in which one's intelligence was understood to increase with the strength of one's disbelief in everything, and nothing real and incontestable was to be discovered, except the individual tastes of each of its members—is no longer that of youth, but a positive, almost a medical philosophy, the philosophy of men who, instead of fixing their aspirations upon external objects, endeavour to separate from the accumulation of the years already spent a defini†
Chpt 3
- He had an idea that it was not merely the truth about what had occurred that afternoon that she was endeavouring to hide from him, but something more immediate, something, possibly, which had not yet happened, but might happen now at any time, and, when it did, would throw a light upon that earlier event.†
Chpt 3endeavouring = trying or attemptingunconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use endeavoring.
- Mme. Verdurin would endeavour to set at rest the scruples of the pianist, whose aunt had remained in Paris: "She will be only too glad to be rid of you for a day.†
Chpt 3unconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use endeavor.
- The effort exhausted Swann's brain, until, passing his hand over his eyes, he cried out: "Heaven help me!" as people, after lashing themselves into an intellectual frenzy in their endeavours to master the problem of the reality of the external world, or that of the immortality of the soul, afford relief to their weary brains by an unreasoning act of faith.†
Chpt 3endeavours = attempts; or things attemptedunconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use endeavors.
- But that of M. de Saint-Cande, girdled, like Saturn, with an enormous ring, was the centre of gravity of a face which composed itself afresh every moment in relation to the glass, while his thrusting red nose and swollen sarcastic lips endeavoured by their grimaces to rise to the level of the steady flame of wit that sparkled in the polished disk, and saw itself preferred to the most ravishing eyes in the world by the smart, depraved young women whom it set dreaming of artificial charms and a refinement of sensual bliss;†
Chpt 3endeavoured = tried or attemptedunconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use endeavored.
- Those graces of an intimate sorrow, 'twas them that the phrase endeavoured to imitate, to create anew; and even their essence, for all that it consists in being incommunicable and in appearing trivial to everyone save him who has experience of them, the little phrase had captured, had rendered visible.†
Chpt 3
- Albeit M. Verdurin had endeavoured to persuade the pianist and Dr. Cottard that their respective aunt and patients had no need of them, and that, in any event, it was most rash to allow Mme. Cottard to return to Paris, where, Mme. Verdurin assured him, a revolution had just broken out, he was obliged to grant them their liberty at Constantinople.†
Chpt 3
- Swann endeavoured to console him.†
Chpt 3
- The pleasure that I derived from the sound of it I felt to be so guilty, that it seemed to me as though the others must read my thoughts, and would change the conversation if I endeavoured to guide it in that direction.†
Chpt 4
- The idea of perfection which I had within me I had bestowed, in that other time, upon the height of a victoria, upon the raking thinness of those horses, frenzied and light as wasps upon the wing, with bloodshot eyes like the cruel steeds of Diomed, which now, smitten by a desire to sea again what I had once loved, as ardent as the desire that had driven me, many years before, along the same paths, I wished to see renewed before my eyes at the moment when Mme. Swann's enormous coachman, supervised by a groom no bigger than his fist, and as infantile as Saint George in the picture, endeavoured to curb the ardour of the flying, steel-tipped pinions with which they thundered along the ground.†
Chpt 4
- And seeing all these new elements of the spectacle, I had no longer the faith which, applied to them, would have given them consistency, unity, life; they passed in a scattered sequence before me, at random, without reality, containing in themselves no beauty that my eyes might have endeavoured as in the old days, to extract from them and to compose in a picture.†
Chpt 4
Definitions:
-
(1)
(endeavor) to attempt; or a project or activity attempted
- (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)