Quotes from Marcel Proust

M. de Charlus and M. de Sidonia had each of them immediately detected the other's vice, which was in both cases that of soliloquising in society, to the extent of not being able to stand any interruption. Having decided at once that, in the words of a famous sonnet, there was 'no help,' they had made up their minds not to be silent but each to go on talking without any regard to what the other might say.

Moreover and above all, a considerable interval of time had elapsed during which, if, from the historical point of view, events had, to some extent, seemed to justify the Dreyfusard argument, the anti-Dreyfusard opposition had doubled its violence, and, from being purely political, had become social. It was now a question of militarism, of patriotism, and the waves of anger that had been stirred up in society had had time to gather the force which they never have at the beginning of a storm.

É em geral com o nosso ser reduzido ao mínimo que nós vivemos, a maioria de nossas faculdades permanece adormecida, porque repousa no hábito, que sabe o que cumpre fazer e não necessita delas.

But the absence of one part from a whole is not only that, it is not simply a partial lack, it is a derangement of all the other parts, a new state which it was impossible to foresee in the old.

In Guermantes, the narrator, admitted to the Duchesse's society after he has been cured of his infatuation with her, tends to record what he sees and hears, to note the disparity between glamour seen from a distance and the triviality it masks when encountered at close quarters.

The things people joke about most are usually those which irritate them, but which they do not want to seem to be irritated by; there is perhaps, too, an unspoken hope of further advantage: that the person we are speaking to, hearing us admit something jokingly, will believe that it is not true.

Yes, indeed, if some of these boys are a bit soft and chicken-hearted and hesitate, they shoot them immediately, a dozen bullets through the skin and that's that. In a way it's got to be done and what does it matter to the officers? They get their pesetas all the same and that's all they care about.

I gazed at Albertine's cheeks as she spoke, and wondered what might be the perfume, the taste of them: that day they were not cool but glowed with a uniform pink, violet-tinted, creamy, like certain roses that have a waxy gloss. I felt a passionate longing for them such as one feels sometimes for a particular flower.

Actually to recognise someone, more still, to identify him you have been unable to recognise, is to think two contradictory things under a single denomination, it is the same as saying that he who was here, the being we recall, is here no longer and that he who is here is one we never knew, that means piercing a mystery almost as troubling as that of death of which it is indeed the preface and the herald.

Je pose la tasse et me tourne vers mon esprit.

Combray, we used often to invite him to our house.

Elástico é o tempo de que dispomos cada dia; as paixões que sentimos o dilatam, as que inspiramos o encurtam e o hábito o enche.

I had drawn back my own curtains, impatient to know what Sea it was that was playing that morning by the shore, like a Nereid. For none of those Seas ever stayed with us longer than a day. On the morrow there would be another, which sometimes resembled its predecessor. But I never saw the same one twice.

Indeed, that pleasure does not exist, isolated and formulated in the consciousness, as the ultimate object with which one seeks a woman's company, or as the cause of the uneasiness which, in anticipation, one then feels.

e chorei de alegria e confiança sobre as páginas do escritor como nos braços de um pai reencontrado." Marcel Proust, in: No caminho de Swann

Pero yo seguía diciéndole: - Ven a la alcoba a darme un beso -aterrorizado al ver cómo ascendía por la pared el reflejo de la bujía de mi padre, pero utilizando su inminente aparición como un medio de intimidación.

You have a lovely soul, of a rare quality, an artist's nature, don't ever let it go without what it needs.

it has indeed been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist, who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.

motionless, gazing, breathing, endeavouring to penetrate with my mind beyond the thing seen or smelt.

Swann's words might have had the result of distorting my eventual understanding of the sonata, as music is so versatile, too prone to suggestion to exclude entirely whatever somebody hints we might hear in it.

Like a book, like a house, the quality of a salon, Mme de Guermantes quite rightly thought, depended essentially on what you excluded.

The very same substance, yet destined to have completely different effects on me. The same illness can evolve; and a sweet poison comes to be less tolerated when, with the years, the heart's resistance has weakened.

Before getting into the carriage I had composed the seascape for which I was going to look out, which I had hoped to see with the 'sun radiant' upon it, and which at Balbec I could distinguish only in too fragmentary a form, broken by so many vulgar intromissions that had no place in my dream, bathers, dressing-boxes, pleasure yachts.

If I stress this episode, it is because it sets the scene for the kind of activity the narrator is to observe with some bafflement in the salons and dinner parties he is to attend. The point is emphasized in the predilection of society people for the theatricals, recitations, and fancy-dress balls that are frequently referred to.