Quotes from Marcel Proust

Françoise was constantly disappearing. The fact was that she had ordered herself a mourning dress, and did not wish to keep her dressmaker waiting. In the lives of most women, everything, even the greatest sorrow, resolves itself into a question of 'trying-on.

Françoise had not yet grasped that our cruelest adversaries are not those who contradict and try to convince us, but those who exaggerate or invent things that are likely to distress us, taking care not to present them in any justifiable light, which would diminish our distress and perhaps lead us to entertain some slight respect for an attitude they are anxious to display to us, to complete our torment, as being both hideous and unassailable.

A esperança de ser aliviado lhe dá ânimo para sofrer.

This was because intense physical suffering had enforced a regime on him. Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed: to kindness, to knowledge we make promises only; pain we obey.

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions.

The need to speak prevents one not merely from listening but from seeing things, and in this case the absence of any description of my external surroundings is tantamount to a description of my internal state.

the sweetness to be found in generosity

After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits become.

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things

I ought then to have been happy; I was not. It struck me that my mother had just made a first concession which must have been painful to her, that it was a first step down from the ideal she had formed for me, and that for the first time she, with all her courage, had to confess herself beaten.

Lo que yo quería era mi madre, decirle adiós, y ya había ido muy lejos por aquel camino que llevaba a la realización de mi deseo para poder volverme atrás.

Gilberte belonged, during those years at least, to the most widespread variety of human ostriches, the kind that bury their heads not in the hope of not being seen, which they consider highly improbable, but in the hope of not seeing that they can be seen, which seems to them something to the good and enables them to leave the rest to chance.

It is a pity to shut oneself indoors in the country,

To make female acquaintances at Balbec would be as easy for me now as it had been difficult before, for I was now as well supplied with friends and resources there as I had been destitute of them on my former visit.

since she could not bring into play the deliberate glances, charged with a definite meaning, which one directs, in a crowd, towards people whom one knows, but must allow her vague thoughts to escape continually from her eyes in a flood of blue light which she was powerless to control,

Once she is dead, we would feel qualms about being other; we now admire only what she was, what we already were, but mixed in with something else, and what henceforth we shall be alone. It is in this sense (and not in that very vague, very false sense in which it is generally understood) that we can say that death is not without its use, that the dead person continues to exercise an influence on us.

de dirección, como un pez en un agua transparente. La belleza no es una especie de superlativo de lo que imaginamos, como un tipo abstracto que tenemos ante los ojos, sino al contrario, un tipo nuevo, imposible de imaginar, y que la realidad nos presenta.

A change in the weather is sufficient to create the world and oneself anew.

the gentle astonishment in her eyes, to which she had added, without daring to address it to anyone in particular, but so that everyone might enjoy his share of it,

it was always to the steeple that one must return, always it which dominated everything else, summing up the houses with an unexpected pinnacle, raised before me like the Finger of God, Whose Body might have been concealed below among the crowd of human bodies without fear of my confounding It, for that reason, with them.

Our furthest-reaching resolutions are always made in a short-lived state of mind. I could barely conceive that the strange substance inhering in Gilberte, and radiating from her parents and the house where she lived, making me feel indifferent to everything else, could detach itself from her person and migrate into another.

Bir sanatç? dünyay? sadece bir hayalin tasvirinde kullan?lacak bir malzeme olarak görür.

Para tornar a realidade suportável, todos temos de cultivar em nós certas pequenas loucuras.