Quotes from Marcel Proust

We come to its aid; we falsify it by memory and by suggestion;

Amava-a, lamentava não ter tido tempo nem a inspiração de ofendê-la, de fazer-lhe mal, de forçá-la a se lembrar de mim. Achava-a tão linda que desejaria retroceder para gritar-lhe, erguendo os ombros: "Como a acho feia, ridícula, como você me repugna".

washed clean like a porcelain, with housewifely care...

And these dreams warned me that since I wanted to be a writer someday, it was time to find out what I meant to write. But as soon as I asked myself this, trying to find a subject in which I could anchor some infinite philosophical meaning, my mind would stop functioning. I could no longer see anything but empty space before my attentive eyes, I felt that I had no talent or perhaps a disease of the brain kept it from being born.

Snaps and snails and puppy-dogs' tails, And dirty sluts in plenty, Smell sweeter than roses in young men's noses When the heart is one-and-twenty.

But there is edited every day in Paris, Balzac would tell us, a sort of spoken newspaper, more terrible than its printed rivals

Hayat?m?z?n ikinci bölümünde aç??a vurdu?umuz mizac?m?z, ço?unlukla öyle olsa bile, her zaman ba?lang?çtaki mizac?m?z?n geli?mi? veya solmu?, güçlenmi? veya yumu?am?? ?ekli de?ildir; bazen de tamamen z?t bir mizaç, adeta tersyüz edilmi? bir giysidir.

She had so little expected to see him that she recoiled in fear. And he himself had run all over Paris not because he thought it was possible to find her, but because it was too hard for him to give up the search.

when she heard the grand title and the great name, her face had taken on that indifferent look—no, more than indifferent, hostile, contemptuous—which is the sign of frustrated desire in proud and passionate natures. Albertine's nature was splendid, but its hidden qualities had been able to develop only under the restrictions constituted by our tastes, or our mourning for the tastes which we have had to renounce

with a quiet suggestion of infinity...

that sense of relief which one has in reading Kant when, after the most rigorous demonstration of determinism, one finds that above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom.

She said merely that it was a delightful pastime because, even if the flowers that sprang from the brush were nothing wonderful, at least the work made you live in the company of real flowers, of the beauty of which, especially when you were obliged to study them closely in order to draw them, you could never grow tired.

The progress of civilization enables each one of us to manifest unsuspected virtues or new vices, which make us either dearer or more unbearable to our friends.

And since Habit, among all the plants that grow in human beings, is the one that has least need of nutritious soil in order to live, the first to appear on the most apparently arid rock, had he begun by treating the rupture as a pretense, he might eventually have become genuinely accustomed to it.

Love?" she had once replied to a pretentious lady who had asked for her views on love, "I make it often but I never talk about it." When

We consider it innocent to desire, and heinous that the other person should do so.

Car ce que les gens ont fait, ils le recommencent indéfiniment. Et qu'on aille voir chaque année un ami qui les premières fois n'a pu venir à votre rendez-vous, ou s'est enrhumé, on le retrouvera avec un autre rhume qu'il aura pris, on le manquera à un autre rendez-vous où il ne sera pas venu, pour une même raison permanente à la place de laquelle il croit voir des raisons variées, tirées des circonstances.

The thought of being made comfortable gives him strength to endure his pain.

De liefde? Die bedrijf ik vaak maar ik spreek er nooit over. (Mme de Villeparisis in 'De kant van Guermantes'.

It was not that Madame Santeuil's moral values had altered, but only her view of the moral values of others.

We find desiring innocent, and hideous that the other should desire.

Even in cases where the multiplication of his modest personal advantages by his self-esteem would not suffice to assure a man the dose of happiness, superior to that accorded to others, which is essential to him, envy is always there to make up the balance.

To the detached observer there is this attraction about these perfect resemblances between pairs of twins, that nature, becoming for the moment industrialised, seems to be offering a pattern for sale.

Je pouvais bien prendre Albertine sur mes genoux, tenir sa tête dans mes mains, je pouvais la caresser, passer longuement mes mains sur elle, mais, comme si j'eusse manié une pierre qui enferme la salure des océans immémoriaux ou le rayon d'une étoile, je sentais que je touchais seulement l'enveloppe close d'un être qui par l'intérieur accédait à l'infini.