Quotes from Marcel Proust

Curaram-no. Mas logo que deixou de ser louco, tornou-se idiota.

Life is strewn with these miracles for which people who love can always hope. It

precisely the same way the pastoral novels of George Sand, which she was giving me for my birthday, were regular lumber-rooms of antique furniture, full of expressions that have fallen out of use and returned as imagery, such as one finds now only in country dialects.

O lovitur? scurt? în fereastr?, ca ?i cum ceva ar fi izbit-o, urmat? de o ampl? c?dere abia sim?it?, de parc? o mîn? de fire de nisip s-ar fi pr?bu?it de la fereastra de deasupra, apoi mi?carea extinzîndu-se, regularizîndu-se, adoptînd un ritm, devenind fluid?, sonor?, muzical?, atotcuprinz?toare, universal?: începea s? plou?.

If we press for a definition of what their admirers mean by the epithet, we shall find that it is generally applied to some unusual picture of a familiar object, a picture different from those that we are accustomed to see, unusual and yet true to nature, and for that reason doubly impressive to us because it startles us, makes us emerge from our habits and at the same time brings us back to ourselves by recalling to us an earlier impression.

The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.

To tell the truth, I had reached the point with Albertine where (if everything continues in the same way, if things follow the normal course) a woman has no more interest for us except as the means of transition to another woman.

Because I seemed to recognize the same sorts of sadness I had experienced in connection with Gilberte—or on those occasions in Combray when Mama had not stayed in my room, and also when I recalled certain pages of Bergotte

but the pleasures that we have chosen can be a long way off if their advent is certain and if, while we await them, we can give ourselves over in the meantime to an idle seeking to attract and to an incapacity for love.

Of all the modes by which love is brought into being, of all the agents which disseminate the holy evil, surely one of the most efficacious is this great gust of agitation

His voice rose. "It reminds me of a room in the Château of Blois where the caretaker who was shewing me over said: 'This is where Mary Stuart used to say her prayers; I use it to keep my brooms in.' Naturally I wish to know nothing more of this house that has let itself be dishonoured

A threat was to materialize, however, coming from a source I had never seen as a potential danger—that is, from Gilberte and myself. I should really have been disturbed by what reassured me, by what I took for happiness. In love, happiness is an abnormal state, capable of instantly conferring on the pettiest-seeming incident, which can occur at any moment, a degree of gravity that in other circumstances it would never have.

the purpose of life now appeared to me as the pursuit not of truth but of loving-kindness, and

We trust in love as we trust in life, without thinking of the underlying emptiness, without too much believing in it. We go on loving because we are starving for affection. We want to enjoy its sustenance, and leave it at that. Thus we begin again not once but many times.

Siamo tutti costretti, per renderci sopportabile la realtà, a coltivare dentro di noi qualche piccola follia.

But now, in spite of her smiles and greetings, I failed to recognise her in a lady whose features had so gone to pieces that the outline of her face could not be restored. What had happened was that for three years she had been taking cocaine and other drugs. Her eyes deeply and darkly rimmed were haggard, her mouth had a strange twitch. She had, it seems, got up for this reception though she was in the habit of remaining in bed or on a sofa for months.

l tempo di cui disponiamo ogni giorno è elastico: le passioni che proviamo lo dilatano, quelle che ispiriamo lo restringono, e l'abitudine lo colma.

We lie all our life long, especially indeed, perhaps only, to those people who love us.

They] can't….understand you: you're such an exceptional person. That's what I liked about you from the start; I felt that you weren't like everybody else.

Die Erinnerung an ein bestimmtes Bild ist wehmutsvolles Gedenken an einen bestimmten Augenblick; und Häuser, Straßen, Avenuen sind flüchtig, ach! Wie die Jahre.

Or chaque jour était pour moi un pays différent.

like the thin, fragile rind, then like the fresh quarter of a fruit that an invisible knife had begun to peel in the sky.

Marcel's attempts to interpret Albertine are constantly deflected—by Aimé's unreliable letters, by Albertine's misinterpreted telegrams, by Marcel's failure to recognize Gilberte at the Guermantes. All of these misreadings could be seen as part of a general comedy or tragedy of social misunderstanding and psychological failure to grasp the nature of other people, as well as one's own self.

In every work of art we can recognise the man the artist has most hated, and alas, even the women he has most loved. They were posing for the writer at the very moment when, against his will, they were making him suffer the most.