Quotes from Marcel Proust

When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy.

I said something friendly or even admiring to her. She was like almost all women, who imagine that the compliment they receive is a strict expression of the truth, that it is a judgment passed impartially, irresistibly, as though it applied to an art object unconnected with a particular individual. And so it was with a seriousness that made me blush at my own hypocrisy that she put the vain and artless question customary in such circumstances, "You like it?

For me, of course, these faces were not what they must have been for Saint-Loup: in his memory, through the transparent indifference of impassive features that feigned not to know him, under the ordinariness of a greeting that could have been exchanged with anyone else, he could see the tumbled hair, the gasping mouth, the half-closed eyes, all the detail of a silent scene which a painter, wishing not to offend visitors to his studio, conceals behind a more seemly canvas.

for as the dead exist only in us, it is ourselves that we strike without ceasing when we persist in recalling the blows that we have dealt them.

as the saying is, climbing in opposition to my

Mas uma lembrança, um pesar são coisas móveis. Dias há em que se vão para tão longe que mal os distinguimos e os julgamos desaparecidos. Começamos então a atentar noutras coisas.

That hateful staircase, up which I always passed with such dismay, gave out a smell of varnish which had to some extent absorbed, made definite and fixed the special quality of sorrow that I felt each evening, and made it perhaps even more cruel to my sensibility because, when it assumed this olfactory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it.

Swann made a hobby of collecting scraps of 'real life')

But life, gradually revealing to me the permanence of our needs, had taught me that if a person is unobtainable we have to settle for someone else, and I felt that what I had asked of Albertine could have been supplied by another, like Mlle de Stermaria.

In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.

Our memory and our heart are not large enough to be able to remain faithful. We have not room enough, in our mental field, to keep the dead there as well as the living. We are obliged to build over what has gone before and is brought to light only by a chance excavation

People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.

No doubt I had long been prepared, by virtue of the sway exercised over my imagination and my ability to be moved by the example of Swann, to believe that what I feared was true, instead of what I would have wished for. Thus the comfort brought by Albertine's affirmations was all but compromised for a moment because I recalled the story of Odette.

It may, incidentally, be observed that the regularity of a habit is usually in direct proportion to its absurdity.

Jealousy is often nothing but an uneasy desire for domination, applied in the context of love. I had no doubt inherited from my father this sudden, arbitrary need to threaten the beings I loved the most in their most comfortable hopes, so as to show that their security was illusory.

timpul meu nu-i chiar atît de pre?ios; cel care l-a f?cut, nu ni l-a vîndut.

In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we are barely conscious of tranquillity.

La filosofia parla spesso di atti liberi e di atti necessari. Forse non ve n'è nessuno più completamente subìto da noi di quello che, in virtù di una forza ascensionale compressa durante l'azione, fa, quando il nostro pensiero è in riposo, risalire così un ricordo livellato agli altri dalla forza oppressiva della distrazione, e slanciarsi, perché a nostra insaputa esso conteneva più degli altri un fascino di cui ci accorgiamo soltanto ventiquattro ore dopo.

There was only one thing she would not do for me, a thing she would have done only at the time when I would have cared nothing for it, and which she would have happily done then for that very reason: that is, tell me the truth.

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.

having the slightest connection either in intensity or in quality with the unimaginable hell that Françoise had allowed me to glimpse when she said, "Miss Albertine has left." In order to represent an unknown situation, the imagination borrows elements already known, and for this reason fails to represent it.

But all that is a thing of the past. With the terrible advance of artillery, the wars of the future, if there are to be any more wars, will be so short that, before we have had time to think of putting our lessons into practice, peace will have been signed.

that their merit resides in the impression that they make on their readers. It is a synthetic Venus, of which we have but one truncated limb if we confine ourselves to the thought of the author, for it is realised in its completeness only in the minds of his readers. In them it finds its fulfilment. And as a crowd, even a select crowd, is not an artist, this final seal of approval which it sets upon the article must always retain a certain element of vulgarity.

I have to say that I had known people whose intelligence was superior. But the infinite extent, or the egoism, of love causes us to love people whose intellectual and moral features are the least objectively defined for us, we readjust them endlessly according to our desires and our fears, we cannot separate them from ourselves, they are no more than a vast and vague terrain where we externalize our affection.