Quotes from Marcel Proust

every social class has its own pathology...

My words therefore did not reflect my feelings in the least. If the reader has only a faint impression of this, that is because, as narrator, I describe my feelings to him at the same time as repeating my words. But if I were to hide the former from him so that he heard only the latter, my actions, which corresponded so little to my words, would so often give him the impression of strange changes in direction that he would think me almost mad.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

This is obviously disloyal, and authors are a pretty low class. Certainly, it would not be a bad thing to meet them once in a way, for thanks to them, when one reads a book or an article, one can 'read between the lines,' 'unmask' the characters. After all, though, the wisest thing is to stick to dead authors.

In reality, every reader, as he reads, is the reader of himself. The work of the writer is only a sort of optic instrument which he offers to the reader so that he may discern in the book what he would probably not have seen in himself.

28. Comment j'aimerais mourir. — Meilleur et aimé. 29. État présent de mon

Ce que je reproche aux journaux, c'est de nous faire faire attention tous les jours à des choses insignifiantes tandis que nous lisons trois ou quatre fois dans notre vie les livres où il y a des choses essentielles.

Cottard will bore you, and that alone will prevent his treatment from having any effect.

recalling our life in the old days at Combray with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncières, Venice, and the rest;

You're the cleverest man I know, do you hear?" He corrected himself, and added: "You and Elstir.—You don't mind my bracketing him with you, I hope. You understand—punctiliousness. It's like this: I say it to you as one might have said to Balzac: 'You are the greatest novelist of the century—you and Stendhal.

I learned that identical emotions do not spring up in the hearts of all men simultaneously, by a pre-established order. Later on I discovered that, whenever I had read for too long and was in a mood for conversation, the friend to whom I would be burning to say something would at that moment have finished indulging himself in the delights of conversation, and wanted nothing now but to be left to read undisturbed.

How I suffered from the position in which careless Nature placed us, when it instituted the separation of bodies from each other, and forgot to provide for the interpenetration of souls!

But the most important thing to admit is this: although, on the one hand, lying is often a trait of character, it is, on the other hand, in women who would not otherwise be liars, a natural defense, at first spontaneous and then gradually more organized, against that sudden danger which is capable of destroying anyone's life: love.

But this was not the opinion that I would instinctively have formed when I heard Albertine say: "In any case, whether he's devoted or not, I sincerely hope I shall never see him again, since he's made us quarrel. We must never quarrel again. It isn't nice." I felt, since she had seemed to desire Saint-Loup, almost cured for the time being of the idea that she cared for women, which I had supposed to be incurable.

To my ear, Bergotte's way of speaking was completely different from his way of writing; and even the things he said differed from the things that fill his books. A voice emerges from a mask; unaided, it is not up to showing us immediately a face we have glimpsed naked in a style.

I had only an imperfect understanding of the nature to which I was bound, whereas today I know the truth about it, at least from a subjective point of view. As for its objective truth, that is, whether these semi-hidden intuitions were any better than my reasoning at capturing Albertine's real intentions, and whether I was right to trust to my nature or whether it did not in fact distort Albertine's intentions instead of clarifying them, is difficult for me now to say.

If Albertine's lips were closed, her eyelids, on the other hand, seen from the point at which I was standing, seemed so loosely joined that I might almost have questioned whether she really was asleep. At the same time those drooping lids introduced into her face that perfect continuity, unbroken by any intrusion of eyes. There are people whose faces assume a quite unusual beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes

Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe,

Often, when, in the hall of the casino, two girls felt desire for each other, there was produced something like a phenomenon of light, a sort of trail of phosphorescence leading from one to the other.

He has made allowances for the difficulty of digesting sauces, for gastric trouble, but he has made no allowance for the effect of reading Shakespeare.

By dint of drinking champagne with them, I began to feel a little of the intoxication that used to come over me at Rivebelle, though probably not quite the same. Not only every kind of intoxication, from that which the sun or travelling gives us to that which we get from exhaustion or wine, but every degree of intoxication—and each must have a different figure, like the numbers of fathoms on a chart—lays bare in us exactly at the depth to which it reaches a different kind of man.

After all," I said to myself, "possibly the pleasure that its author has found in writing it is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; it may be only an accessory, one that is often to be found superadded to that value, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written yawning.

now my weary limbs turned to it for support; so that, in turn, thighs, hips, shoulders burrowed into, trying to adhere at every angle to, the sheets that covered its mattress, as if my fatigue, like a sculptor, had wished to take a cast of an entire human body.

Não tinha à minha frente mais que um senhor de casaca que se ia afastando; mas eu manobrava em seu redor, como um refletor defeituoso, e sem conseguir aplicá-lo exatamente sobre ele, o pensamento de que era o príncipe de Saxe e ia ver a princesa de Guermantes.