Quotes from Marcel Proust

If I have always been so much interested in dreams, is it not because, compensating duration with intensity they help us to understand better what is subjective in love?

By the last days of December, it had come to seem likely that I would receive such a letter. Whether it was really likely or not, our desire for such a letter, our need for it, is enough to make us believe it will probably come. The soldier is convinced that an indefinitely extendable period must elapse before he will be killed, the thief before he will be arrested, all of us before we must die.

But we would emerge from our shelter, for the rain was playing a game, now, among the branches, and, even when it was almost dry again underfoot, a stray drop or two, lingering in the hollow of a leaf, would run down and hang glistening from the point of it until suddenly it splashed plump upon our upturned faces from the whole height of the tree.

With Albertine, I felt that I would never learn anything, would never succeed in unraveling this tangled multiplicity of authentic details and untruthful facts. And that it would always be thus, unless I were to put her in prison (but people escape) up until the end.

Succession to a name is sad like all successions and seems like an usurpation; and the uninterrupted stream of new Princesses de Guermantes would flow until the millennium, the name held from age to age by different women would always be that of one living Princesse de Guermantes, a name that ignored death, that was indifferent to change and heartaches and which would close over those who had worn it like the sea in its serene and immemorial placidity.

for they are produced whenever there needs to establish itself in the security necessary to its development a vice which Nature herself has planted in the soul of a child, perhaps by no more than blending the virtues of its father and mother, as she might blend the colours of their eyes.

draw upon his knowledge of the world, if he read in a newspaper the names of the people who had been at a dinner-party, could tell at once its exact degree of smartness, just as a man of letters, simply by reading a sentence, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

Quand on aime, l'amour est trop grand pour pouvoir être contenu tout entier en nous; il irradie vers la personne aimée, rencontre en elle une surface qui l'arrête, le force à revenir vers son point de départ et c'est ce choc en retour de notre propre tendresse que nous appelons les sentiments de l'autre et qui nous charme plus qu'à l'aller, parce que nous ne reconnaissons pas qu'elle vient de nous.

He knew himself so little that he doubtless imagined that he was in love with her, perhaps indeed that he would be in love with her always

Possibly they knew better than I did that the Duchesse de Guise was Princess of Cleves, of Orléans, of Porcien, and so forth, but long before they knew all these names, they had known the Duchesse de Guise's face, which was subsequently what this name reflected back to them. I had begun with the fairy, even if she was soon fated to perish; they had begun with the woman herself.

Conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.

It is true that the two men were not acquainted and had little or nothing in common, but psychological laws, like physical laws, have a more or less general relevance. And if the appropriate conditions are the same, the same expression lights up the eyes of different human animals, just as the same morning sky lights up places that are remote from one another and have no connection.

Admirava a impotência do espírito, do raciocínio e do coração em operarem a mínima conversão, em resolverem uma só dessas dificuldades, que em seguida a vida, sem que se saiba ao menos como o fez, tão facilmente soluciona.

My first impression of them had been quite the opposite: I had found them very ordinary, just like anyone else, but this was because, before actually meeting them, I had seen them, as I saw Balbec, Florence, and Parma, as magical names.

She was obliged, of course, to admit that Swann was not interested in money, but she would add sulkily: "It's not the same thing, you see, with him," and, as a matter of fact, what appealed to her imagination was not the practice of disinterestedness, but its vocabulary.

in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice: I preferred not to see them;

I did not believe what he was saying, but I bore him no ill-will for that, for I had inherited from my mother and grandmother their incapacity for resentment even of far worse offenders, and their habit of never condemning anyone

But you are our equal, if not our superior," the Guermantes seemed, in all their actions, to be saying; and they said it in the most courteous fashion imaginable, to be loved, admired, but not to be believed; that one should discern the fictitious character of this affability was what they called being well-bred; to suppose it to be genuine, a sign of ill-breeding.

But, as my sister says, 'there must always be poor people so that now that I'm rich I can shit on them.

I saw her thus, solid, flushed, opulent and captive, returning home quite naturally with myself, as a woman who was my own property, and, protected by its walls, disappearing into our house. Unfortunately, she seemed to feel herself a prisoner there, and to share the opinion of that Mme. de La Rochefoucauld who, when somebody asked her whether she was not glad to live in so beautiful a home as Liancourt, replied: "There is no such thing as a beautiful prison

I arrived there at the same time as the Germans. Everybody wanted to prevent me going, I was treated as though I were mad. 'What,' they said to me, 'you are safe in Paris and you want to leave for those invaded regions just as everybody else is trying to get away from them?' I recognised the justice of this reasoning but what was to be done?

Carus Amicus Mussaeus, Ah! Quod tempus, bonus Deus, Landerirette Imbre sumus perituri. And La Moussaye reassures him with: Securae sunt nostrae vitae Sumus enim Sodomitae Igne tantum perituri Landeriri.

do you think it possible for a woman really to be touched by a man's being in love with her, and never to be unfaithful to him?

I was poised on its dizzy summit,