Quotes from Marcel Proust

Unutu?, görevini yerine getirmiyor de?ildi, ama ayn? zamanda özlenen görüntünün ülküselle?tirilmesine ve dolay?s?yla, ilk andaki ac?n?n onu peki?tiren benzer ac?larla bütünle?tirilmesine katk?da bulunuyordu.

The words that passed between the girls of the little band and myself were not of any interest; they were, moreover, but few, broken by long spells of silence on my part. All of which did not prevent me from finding, in listening to them when they spoke to me, as much pleasure as in gazing at them, in discovering in the voice of each one of them a brightly colored picture. It was with ecstasy that I caught their pipings.

The laborious process of causation which sooner or later will bring about every possible effect, including (consequently) those which one had believed to be most nearly impossible, naturally slow at times, is rendered slower still by our impatience (which in seeking to accelerate only obstructs it) and by our very existence, and comes to fruition only when we have ceased to desire it—have ceased, possibly, to live.

Our parallel lives resemble paths bordered at intervals by flower-vases placed symmetrically but not facing each other.

Kaybetmekten en çok korktu?umuz zenginlikler, kalbimiz taraf?ndan ele geçirilmedikleri için, d???m?zda kalm?? olanlard?r.

that feeling of veneration which we always have for those who wield unrestrained power to do us harm.

Perhaps the immobility of the things around us is imposed on them by our certainty that they are themselves and not others, by the immobility of our mind confronting them.

Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust. But so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lighted, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which has vanished even the memory of the darkness.

And thinking again of the sameness of Vinteuil's works, I explained to Albertine that the great men of letters have never created more than a single work, or rather have never done more than refract through various media an identical beauty which they bring into the world.

But if Mme. Sherbatoff did not look at the audience, remained in shadow, it was to try to forget that there existed a living world which she passionately desired and was unable to know

For every sin there is forgiveness, and especially for the sins of youth.

Custom came to take me in her arms, carried me all the way up to my bed, and laid me down there like a little child.

looked longingly at the characteristic features he shared with the Guermantes, a race that retains its individuality in a world by which it is not submerged, and in which it remains isolated in its divinely ornithological glory, for it seems to have sprung, in the age of mythology, from the union of a goddess and a bird.

for the people who decline to give you the things you desire give you other things.

It has been said that beauty is the promise of happiness. Reversing the idea, the prospect of pleasure can also be the beginning of beauty.

Na realidade, todo leitor é, quando lê, o leitor de si mesmo. A obra não passa de uma especie de instrumento óptico oferecido ao leitor a fim de lhe ser possível discernir o que, sem ela, não teria certamente visto em si mesmo. O reconhecimento, por seu foro íntimo, do que diz o livro, é a prova da verdade deste [...].

In that great game of hide and seek which is played in our memory when we seek to recapture a name, there is not any series of gradual approximations. We see nothing, then suddenly the name appears in its exact form and very different from what we thought we could make out.

Acontece que os diversos períodos da nossa vida vêm assim cruzar-se uns com os outros. Por causa de uma coisa que queremos hoje e amanhã nos será indiferente, negamo-nos a ver outra coisa que agora nada nos diz, mas que haveremos de querer mais adiante, e que, se houvéssemos consentido em vê-la, talvez tivéssemos desejado antes, abreviando assim as nossas dores atuais, se bem que na verdade para substituí-las por outras.

Victor Hugo, ?öyle der: Çimenler uzamal?, çocuklar ölmeli mutlaka. Ben diyorum ki, sanat?n ac?mas?z yasas? uyar?nca, insanlar?n, kendimizin, ?st?rab?n her türünü tatt?ktan sonra ölmesi gerekir ki, unutu?un de?il, ebedî hayat?n çimleri, verimli eserlerin gür otlar? uzas?n, gelecek nesiller ne?e içinde, alt?nda uyuyanlara ald?rmadan gelip "k?rda yemek"lerini yiyebilsinler.

since the beauty of human beings is not like the beauty of things,

Bir insan öldükten sonra, e?er sanatç?ysa ve eserine kendinden bir ?eyler katm??sa, o insan?n bir parças?n?n ya?amaya devam edebilece?i söylenir bazen. Belki ayn? ?ekilde, bir insandan al?n?p ba?ka bir insan?n kalbine a??lanan sürgün de, al?nd??? insan yok olduktan sonra bile ya?amaya devam eder.

He who is in the wrong believes himself in the right, as was the case with Germany, and he who is in the right supports it with arguments which only appear irrefutable to him because they respond to his anger.

My mother, torn between her love for my father and her hope that I might turn out to have brains, preserved an impartiality which she expressed by silence.

Without inquiring too deeply into the causes which make it possible to find subjects of gaiety always close at hand, the proof of that possibility can be found in the fact that persons of sensitive intelligence are capable of finding comic potentialities in everything and everybody, thereby demonstrating that if some people hold the belief that there is very little that is laughable in the world, the reason is that they lack the ability to find it.