Quotes from Marcel Proust

Some of the foodstuffs being sold in the street, which I myself hated, were among Albertine's favorites, so that Françoise sent her kitchen-boy out to buy them, even if he perhaps felt it beneath his dignity to have to mingle in this way with the common herd. The cries sounded clearly in this quiet neighborhood, where noise was no longer a grievance for Françoise, and had become a source of pleasure to me.

since my sorrow was directed not at what Albertine had been for me but at what my heart, desiring to participate in the more general emotions of love, had come to persuade me that she was; then I realized that this life which had so bored me—or at least so I thought—had, on the contrary, been delicious;

brž ko ljubiš, nimaš nikogar ve? rad

but other people, as we get to know them, are like a metal dipped in an acid bath, and we see them gradually lose their good qualities (and their bad qualities too, at times).

I was struck for the first time by this lack of harmony between our impressions and their normal forms of expression.

Memory, instead of being a duplicate always present before our eyes of the various events of our life, is rather an abyss from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables us to draw up, restored to life, dead impressions; but even then there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain for ever beyond our control.

Forgive me, Bertrand, for having on that day loved in you a beauty in which your self-esteem could take no pride, which could not in any way determine my affection.

there is always less egoism in pure imagination than in recollection;

as great poets do when the tyranny of rhyme forces them into the discovery of their finest lines.

A ressurreição ao despertar — após esse benéfico aspecto de alienação mental que é o sono — deve assemelhar-se no fundo ao que se passa quando encontramos um nome, um verso, um estribilho esquecido. E a ressurreição da alma após a morte talvez seja concebível como um fenômeno de memória.

Nous sentons très bien que notre sagesse commence où celle de l'auteur finit, et nous voudrions qu'il nous donnât des réponses, quand tout ce qu'il peut faire est de nous donner des désirs.

The end of a book's wisdom appears to us as merely the start of our own, so that at the moment when the book has told us everything it can, it gives rise to the feeling that it has told us nothing.

A peculiarity of love, moreover, is that it makes us at once more mistrustful and more credulous, makes us quicker to suspect the one we love than we would have another woman, and to be readier to lend credence to her denials.

There are some faces which take on an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they no longer have a gaze.

Painful recollections are always of the dead. And the dead decompose rapidly, and there remains the beauty of nature, silence, the purity of air.

The time we have to spend each day is elastic: it is stretched by the passions we feel; it is shrunk by those we inspire; and all of it is filled by habit.

But failure to understand a joke has never yet made anyone find it less amusing,

And so it is with things that we shall later love the most. We meet them first as strangers who give us only a feeling of surprise.

It is one of the most dreadful things for the lover that, while particular facts—which only the test of experience, or even spying, can verify from among so many possibilities—are so difficult to unearth, the truth, on the other hand, is so easy to discover or simply to intuit.

In leaving Balbec, I had imagined that I was leaving Gomorrah, plucking Albertine from it; in reality, alas, Gomorrah was dispersed to all the ends of the earth. And partly out of jealousy, partly out of ignorance of such joys (a case which is rare indeed), I had arranged unawares this game of hide and seek in which Albertine was always to escape me.

the more permanent colour of the flowers themselves, with the utmost profundity, evanescence, and mystery—with a quiet suggestion of infinity

He lost his temper once only, because she cried, which he considered cowardly, unworthy of her. People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked

But we have looked too far ahead, for all this did not happen until after the Verdurins' party which we have interrupted, and we must go back to the point at which we left off.

but I must say there's nothing amuses me like a little devilry now and then. Life would be dreadfully monotonous without it.