Quotes from Marcel Proust

I might go alone as far as the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs: never did I find there the girl whom I should inevitably have met, had I been with my grandfather, and so unable to engage her in conversation.

But political passions are like all the rest, they do not last. New generations arise which no longer understand them; even the generation that experienced them changes, experiences new political passions which, not being modelled exactly upon their predecessors, rehabilitate some of the excluded, the reason for exclusion having altered.

Her kad?n, bir erke?in üzerindeki gücü ne kadar fazlaysa, gitmenin tek yolunun da kaçmak oldu?unu hisseder. Kraliçe oldu?u için kaçak olmak zorundad?r.

The reason why life may be judged to be trivial, although at certain moments to us, it seems so beautiful, is that we form our judgement ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself, but of the mental images which preserve nothing of life and therefore, we judge it disparagingly.

that half of the human race in whom the curiosity the other half feels about the people it does not know is replaced by an interest in the people it does.

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself.

And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory.

Appreciate your life with greater intensity.

For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart.

this early Swann in whom I can distinguish the charming mistakes of my childhood, and who, incidentally, is less like his successor than he is like the other people I knew at that time, as though one's life were a series of galleries in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness, the same (so to speak) tonality

La muraille de l'escalier où je vis monter le reflet de sa bougie n'existe plus depuis longtemps. En moi aussi bien des choses ont été détruites que je croyais devoir durer toujours, et de nouvelles se sont édifiées, donnant naissance à des peines et à des joies nouvelles que je n'aurais pu prévoir alors, de même que les anciennes me sont devenues difficiles à comprendre.

At last, in Albertine walking with the lady in gray down the little street that led to the bath-house, I saw before my eyes a fragment of that past which seemed to me no less mysterious and terrifying than I had feared when I imagined it enclosed within Albertine's eyes and within her memories.

Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner darkroom, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.

Even when one is no longer interested in things, it is still something to have been interested in them; because it was always for reasons which other people did not grasp. The memory of those sentiments is, we feel, to be found only in ourselves; we must go back into ourselves to study it.

Unfortunately, if the eyes are sometimes the organ through which our intelligence is revealed, the nose (to leave out of account the intimate solidarity and the unsuspected repercussion of one feature upon the rest), the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

Aunque nada cambie, si yo cambio, todo cambia.

Self-interest implicit in not being wrong in our pre-judgment limits the time we shall remember it and encourages us to believe we never indulged in it.

little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain.

The peculiar tendency which he had always had to look for analogies between living people and the portraits in galleries reasserted itself here,

No por saber una cosa se la puede impedir; pero siquiera las cosas que averiguamos las tenemos, si no entre las manos, por lo menos en el pensamiento, y allí están a nuestra disposición, lo cual nos inspira la ilusión de gozar sobre ellas una especie de dominio

with the slight emotion which a man feels when, even without being fully aware of what he is doing, he says something, not because it is true but because he enjoys saying it, and listens to his own voice uttering the words as though they came from some one else,

Our love of life is no more than an old affair that we do not know how to discontinue. Its strength lies in its permanence. But death, which interrupts it, will cure us of our desire for immortality.

An artist, however modest, is always willing to hear himself preferred to his rivals, and tries only to see that justice is done them.

And if she had appeared, would I have dared to speak to her? I felt that she would have regarded me as mad, for I no longer thought of those desires which came to me on my walks, but were never realized, as being shared by others, or as having any existence apart from myself.