A single sentence constructed from every line containing the word House in volume 1 of the novel In Search of Lost Time by M. Proust
It was no good my knowing that I was not in any of those houses of which, if I had not caught sight exactly, I could still believe in their possible presence, for memory was now set in motion, and her permanent and unfaltering resolution to render the house uninhabitable, her presence gave the house what none other of the houses that he visited seemed to possess: a sort of tactual sense, a nervous system which ramified into each of its rooms and sent a constant stimulus to his heart and so the simple and regular manifestations of a social organism were transformed and having always had a craze for pictures, he now lived and piled up his collections in an old house in a neighborhood in which my great-aunt thought it most degrading to be quartered; the news that the house was being destroyed by a fire, in which all the rest of us had already perished, a fire which, in a little while, would not leave one stone standing upon another, but from which she herself would still have plenty of time to escape without undue haste, provided that she rose at once from her bed, or that perhaps it is a simple dwelling-house that stands alone, ugly, if anything, timid-seeming but full of romance, hiding from every eye some imperishable secret of happiness and disenchantment, and I have every useless thing in the world in my house there, the only thing wanting was that the necessary thing had been evicted, vacant and roomy as an untenanted house, in the depths of its unvalued eyes a lingering sense, uncertain but not unpleasing, half-memory and half-oblivion, and then her house in Combray, then her bedroom, and finally her bed, but to suppose that she went to bad houses, that she abandoned herself to orgies with other women, that she led the crapulous existence of the most abject, the most contemptible of mortals, none of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.