Quotes from Marcel Proust

Indeed it seemed to me, in the moments when I suffered the least, that I almost benefited from her death, for a woman is all the more useful in our lives if she is an agent of sorrow rather than an element of happiness, and there is not a single woman whose possession is as precious as the truths which she enables us to discover by making us suffer.

never cease to kiss him. Every kiss provokes another. Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life. How closely, in their abundance, are they pressed one against another; until lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour, as to count the flowers in a meadow in May.

but the steps of thought we take during the lonely work of artistic creation all lead us downward, deeper into ourselves, the only direction that is not closed to us, the only direction in which we can advance, albeit with much greater travail, toward an outcome of truth. Moreover, friendship is not just devoid of virtue, as conversation is, it is actively pernicious.

all those other pleasures in the thick of which my imagination had enwrapped

Reading is at the threshold of our inner life; it can lead us into that life but cannot constitute it.

You can make a new version of what you love only by renouncing it.

I am not working for posterity, M. de Charlus replied, I am content with life, it is quite interesting enough, as poor Swann used to say.

When the compartments in which we live parts of our lives are too different from one another, we can expend ourselves on a person who, by the following day, may come to seem uninteresting. But we feel responsible for what we may have said the night before, and wish to honor it.

linked all of a sudden to places from which I had thought it quite distinct, lost its mystery and took up its place in the region, leading me to reflect in terror that Mme Bovary and La Sanseverina9 would perhaps have struck me as creatures like any other had I come across them anywhere except in the enclosed atmosphere of a novel.

was nevertheless still young, since I had been able to write her one, by means of which I hoped, in telling her of my solitary dreams of love and longing, to arouse similar dreams in her. The sadness of men who have grown old lies in their no longer even thinking of writing such letters, the futility of which their experience has shown.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those we had regarded as not being lived at all : the days spent wholly with a favourite book

It has been said that silence is a force; in another and widely different sense it is a tremendous force in the hands of those who are loved.

Although it is rightly said that there can be no progress, no discovery in art, but only in the sciences, and that each artist starting afresh on an individual effort cannot be either helped or hindered therein by the efforts of any other, it must none the less be acknowledged that, in so far as art brings to light certain laws, once an industry has popularized them, the art that was first in the field loses retrospectively a little of its originality.

Le bonheur seul est salutaire pour le corps

For the fact is that there is no humiliation so great that one should not accept it with unconcern, knowing that at the end of a few years our misdeeds will be no more than an invisible dust buried beneath the smiling and blooming peace of nature.

my mother waited for me, gazing at the canal with a patience that she would never have shown before, in Combray, in the days when she invested in me hopes that had never been rewarded and wanted to hide from me the extent of her love for me. Now she clearly felt that a show of coldness would change nothing, and the affection which she lavished on me resembled the food that is no longer forbidden to a sick person when we realize that they have no chance of recovery.

Having a liking for someone is one thing; but to be afflicted with the sadness, the feeling of something irreparable having happened, the anguish which all accompany the onset of love, what is necessary is the risk – which may even be the object to which passion in its fretfulness tries to cling, rather than to a person – of an impossibility.

Là où la vie emmure, l'intelligence perce une issue.

Un día que habían salvado contra su voluntad a una viuda que se había arrojado al agua, mi abuela me había dicho (movida acaso por uno de esos presentimientos que leemos a veces en el misterio, tan oscuro, sin embargo, de nuestra vida orgánica, pero en que parece como que se refleja lo por venir) que no conocía crueldad semejante a la de arrancar a una desesperada a la muerte que ella misma ha querido y devolverla a su martirio.

Unfortunately my parents had recourse to principles entirely different from those which I suggested they should adopt

People said that an age of speed required rapidity in art, precisely as they might have said that the next war could not last longer than a fortnight, or that the coming of railways would kill the little places beloved of the coaches, which the motor-car, for all that, was to restore to favour.

But when it comes to the disconcerting actions of our fellow-men, we rarely discover their motives.

Une œuvre est à la fois le souvenir de nos amours passées et la prophétie de nos amours nouvelles

J'étais affreusement déçu, et l'idée qu'il était plus difficile et plus flatteur d'avoir une lettre de Bergotte ne me consolait en rien qu'elle ne fût pas de la laitière.