Quotes from Marcel Proust

These were happy, cheerful moments, innocent in appearance but hiding the growing possibility of disaster: this is what makes the life of lovers the most unpredictable of all, a life in which it can rain sulfur and pitch a moment after the sunniest spell and where, without having the courage to learn from our misfortunes, we immediately start building again on the slopes of the crater which can only spew out catastrophe. I was carefree in the way of those who think their happiness can last.

Such grave uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is also the obscure country where it must seek and where all its baggage will be nothing to it.

I have had occasion to meet with, in convents for instance, literally saintly examples of practical charity, they have generally had the brisk, decided, undisturbed and slightly brutal air of a busy surgeon, the face in which one can discern no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, and no fear of hurting it, the face devoid of gentleness or sympathy, the sublime face of true goodness.

she had said, so naturally and with such an air of conviction that he had been genuinely touched.

The ray of light beneath his door is extinguished. It is midnight; some one has turned out the gas; the last servant has gone to bed, and he must lie all night in agony with no one to bring him any help. I

An artist has no need to express his thought directly in a work for the work to reflect its quality; it has even been said the highest praise of God is to be found in the denial of him by the atheist, who considers creation to be perfect enough to dispense with a creator.

This at once made up a gathering of several half-worthy individuals; and if a small patch of garden with a few trees,

We do not know where to find what we seek; and often we avoid for a long time the very place to which others, for other reasons, invite us, not knowing that it is the very spot where we could meet the one who is in our thoughts.

Love teaches us much, but also it much corrupts us.

But memories and griefs are fleeting things.

Even in his most artificial creations, nature is the material upon which man has to work.

Mon plaisir ne serait plus dans le monde mais dans la littérature.

Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would creep up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to 'come on' for a while, and so goes 'in front' in her ordinary clothes to watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself.

Je fis comme eux avec cet air naturel d'un libre-penseur dans une église, lequel ne connaît pas la messe, mais se lève quand tout le monde se lève et se met à genoux un peu après que tout le monde s'est mis à genoux.

If I had been able to get out and speak to one of these girls we passed, I might well have been disillusioned by some flaw in her complexion that I had been unaware of from the carriage. (In that case, it would suddenly have felt impossible for me to make any effort to become part of her life. For beauty is a succession of hypotheses, and ugliness restricts these by blocking the way that seemed to be already leading us into the heart of the unknown.)

For even if we have the sensation of being always surrounded by our own soul, it is not as though by a motionless prison: rather, we are in some sense borne along with it in a perpetual leap to go beyond it.

but what fascinated me would be the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world.

and yet I had given up hope of encountering in the street what I had come there to seek, the affection promised to me at the theater in a smile, the figure of a woman, and the bright face beneath her fair hair, which were only real when seen from a distance. Now I could not even have said what Mme de Guermantes was like, what I recognized her by, for every day, in the picture she presented as a whole, the face was as different as the dress and the hat.

The 'action' began: to me it seemed all the more obscure because in those days, when I read to myself, I used often, while I turned the pages, to dream of something quite different. And to the gaps which this habit made in my knowledge of the story more were added by the fact that when it was Mamma who was reading to me aloud she left all the love-scenes out.

I needed to live with the idea of the death of Albertine, with the idea of her misdeeds, for these ideas to become habitual, that is for me to be able to forget these ideas and finally forget Albertine herself.

The most mysterious, most simple, most atrocious revealed herself in the answer which she made me with an air of disgust and the exact words to tell the truth I could not quite make out (even the opening words, for she did not finish her sentence). I succeeded in establishing them only a little later when I had guessed what was in her mind. We hear things retrospectively when we have understood them

We are very slow in recognising in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the type which is labelled 'great talent' in our museum of general ideas. Simply because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent. We say rather originality, charm, delicacy, strength; and then one day we add up the sum of these, and find that it amounts simply to talent.

Despite the heavy, motionless silence of the hawthorns, these gusts of fragrance came to me like the murmuring of an intense vitality, with which the whole altar was quivering like a roadside hedge explored by living antennae, of which I was reminded by seeing some stamens, almost red in colour, which seemed to have kept the springtime virulence, the irritant power of stinging insects now transmuted into flowers.

Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner dark-room the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people.