Quotes from Marcel Proust

Vakit kaybetmemek için yataktan kalkt?m, ama ac? beni oldu?um yere çiviledi: O gitti?inden beri ilk kez yataktan kalk?yordum.

It is true that this person is to blame for having lied to us, for she had sworn to us that she would always tell us the truth. But we know from our own shortcomings, towards other people, how little an oath is worth.

Ah! there is a man who justifies the wit who insisted that one ought never to know an author except through his books.

And Labruyère tells us that that is everything. 'To be with the people one loves, to speak to them, not to speak to them, it is all the same.' He is right; that is the only form of happiness

friends being friends only in the sense of a sweet madness which overcomes us in life and to which we yield, though at the back of our minds we know it to be the error of a lunatic who imagines the furniture to be alive and talks to it)

Custom! that skilful but unhurrying manager

It is true that those same servants who cannot bear our tears will have no hesitation in letting us catch pneumonia, because the maid downstairs likes draughts and it would not be polite to her to shut the windows.

They seemed nothing more now than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creatures of my temperament

The world is going too far in these days. As my poor Octave used to say, we have forgotten God too often, and He is taking vengeance upon us.

For what people have once done they will do again indefinitely, and if you go every year to see a friend who, the first time, was not able to meet you at the appointed place, or was in bed with a chill, you will find him in bed with another chill which he has just caught, you will miss him again at another meeting-place at which he has failed to appear, for a single and unalterable reason in place of which he supposes himself to have various reasons, drawn from the circumstances.

I no longer loved Albertine. At most there were occasional days which brought the kind of weather that, modifying and stimulating our sensitivity, restores our contact with reality, making me feel bitterly sad when I thought of her. I suffered from a love that no longer existed. Thus when the weather changes do amputees feel pain in the leg they have lost.

They were in no way connected now with nature, with the world of real things, which from now onwards lost all its charm and significance, and meant no more to my life than a purely conventional framework, just as the action of a novel is framed in the railway carriage, on a seat of which a traveller is reading it to pass the time.

You know," I said to her as we got back into the carriage, "the life of a resort and the life of travel make me realize that the theater of the world has fewer sets at its disposal than actors, and fewer actors than 'situations.

Les faits ne pénètrent pas dans le monde où vivent nos croyances, ils n'ont pas fait naître celles-ci, ils ne les détruisent pas.

bij alles wat het stempel draagt van de werkelijke dood, die zo verschilt van zijn logische en abstracte mogelijkheid ...

They talk about vandalism, about the destruction of statues, but is not the destruction of so many wonderful young men who were polychrome statues of incomparable beauty also vandalism? Is not a city in which there are no more beautiful men like a city in which all the statuary has been destroyed?

Our desires cut across one another's paths, and in this confused existence it is but rarely that a piece of good fortune coincides with the desire that clamoured for it.

Every time we are assailed by images of women very different from ourselves, unless these images are eliminated by being forgotten or overlaid by others, we can have no peace of mind until we have converted these strangers into something more like us, the self in that respect being similar in its action and reactions to the physical organism, which is incapable of accepting a foreign body within itself without immediately setting to work to digest and assimilate the intruder.

her own form is still rather vague; and we may wonder whether she will turn into a goddess, a table, or a bowl.

To think that all those splendid footmen six feet high, who adorned the monumental staircases of our beautiful lady friends, have all been killed, most of them having joined up because people kept on telling them that the war would only last two months.

My mother had not forgotten the sad end of M. Vinteuil's life, his complete absorption, first in having to play both mother and nursery-maid to his daughter, and, later, in the suffering which she had caused him;

What is utterly detestable is the Victor Hugo of the last stage, the Légende des Siècles, I forget all their names. But in the Feuilles d'Automne, the Chants du Crépuscule, there's a great deal that's the work of a poet, a true poet! Even in the Contemplations,

It appeared that the deference which, on my grandmother's authority, we owed to Mme. de Villeparisis imposed on her the reciprocal obligation to do nothing that would render her less worthy of our regard, and that she had failed in her duty in becoming aware of Swann's existence and in allowing members of her family to associate with him. "How should she know Swann? A lady who, you always made out, was related to Marshal Mac-Mahon!

O modo inquisitivo, ansioso, exigente com que olhamos para a pessoa amada, nossa expectativa da palavra que nos vai dar ou tirar a esperança de um encontro para o dia seguinte, e, até que essa palavra seja dita, a nossa imaginação alternada, se não simultânea, da alegria e do desespero, tudo isso torna a nossa atenção em face do ente querido muito trêmula para que se possa obter uma imagem sua devidamente nítida.