Quotes from Marcel Proust

an icy shudder convulsed his body and he burst into sobs. He did not wish to know why, but dried his eyes, saying with a smile: "This is delightful; I'm becoming neurasthenic.

Once in my room I had to stop every loophole, to close the shutters, to dig my own grave as I turned down the bed-clothes, to wrap myself in the shroud of my nightshirt.

the original of the copy they have in the Louvre.

To remain blind to what is false in the claims of the individual called Germany, to see justice in every claim of the individual called France, the surest way was not for a German to lack judgment and for a Frenchman to possess it but for both to be patriotic.

Her presence in our household was the country air and the social life of a farm of fifty years ago transported into our midst by a kind of inverse journey in which the holiday destination travels toward the traveler.

But as soon as I was with some one else, when I began to talk to a friend, my mind at once 'turned about,' it was towards the listener and not myself that it directed its thoughts, and when they followed this outward course they brought me no pleasure.

I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any other...

like an entirely cloudless sky when one is going mountaineering...

Let the intellect get to work; in the course of it there will be more than enough sorrows to enable him to finish it.

social, and even individual differences are merged when seen from a distance in the uniformity of an epoch.

when the fortress of the body is besieged on all sides the mind must at length succumb.

it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.

In my adolescence, when I believed exactly what I was told, doubtless, on hearing the German Government protest its good faith, I should have been inclined to believe it, but now for a long time I had realised that our thoughts do not always correspond with our words.

And while Bloch's eye gleamed as he thought of what the conversation of these marvellous people must have been, I was thinking that I had exaggerated my pleasure in their society, having never got any until I was alone and could differentiate them in my imagination. Did Bloch realise this?

three women each of whom I had once loved, I said to myself that our social existence is, like an artist's studio, filled with abandoned sketches in which we have fancied for a moment that we could set down in permanent form our need of a great love, but it did not occur to me that sometimes, if the sketch be not too old, it may happen that we return to it and make of it a work wholly different, and possibly more important than what we had originally planned.

It has occurred to me subsequently that this moment of her stroke cannot have come as a complete surprise to my grandmother, that she had possibly even foreseen it well before it occurred, lived with the thought that it would happen. She had not known, of course, when this fatal moment would come—of that she was unsure, as lovers are when a similar sense of uncertainty leads them to base unreasonable hopes and, in turn, unjustified suspicions on the fidelity of their mistresses.

Gone are the Kings, gone are their towering prows, Vanished upon the raging deep, alas, The long-haired warrior heroes of Hellas.

even while deceiving him, she loved him. How often we sacrifice the fulfillment of a possible happiness to our impatience for an immediate pleasure!

unforeseen situations force us to enter into deeper contact with ourselves, the painful dilemmas in which love places us at every instant, instruct us, disclose to us successively the matter of which we are made.

Our love of life is only an old connexion of which we do not know how to rid ourself. Its strength lies in its permanence. But death which severs it will cure us of the desire for immortality.

A imobilidade das coisas que nos cercam talvez lhes seja imposta por nossa certeza de que essas coisas são elas mesmas e não outras, pela imobilidade de nosso pensamento perante elas.

For, as far as these important diplomats are concerned, to look at you in a certain way is intended to convey to you not that they have seen you but that they have not, and that they have some serious matter

And I might, in order to justify myself, have told her that I loved her. But the confession of that love, apart from the fact that it could not have told Albertine anything new, would perhaps have made her colder to myself than the harshness and deceit for which love was the sole excuse. To be harsh and deceitful to the person whom we love is so natural!

To anything that we do not know to be related to the real life of the person whom we love we pay but scant attention, we forget immediately what she has said to us about some incident or people that we do not know, and her expression while she was saying it.