Quotes from Marcel Proust

In actual fact, his nature was really like a sheet of paper in which so many folds have been made in every direction that it is impossible to know where you are.

This fleetingness of persons who are not known to us, who force us to put out from the harbour of life, in which the women whose society we frequent have all, in course of time, laid bare their blemishes, urges us into that state of pursuit in which there is no longer anything to arrest the imagination. But to strip our pleasures of imagination is to reduce them to their own dimensions, that is to say to nothing.

there is a way of separating one's dreams from one's life which so often produces good results that I ask myself whether one ought not, at all costs, to try it, simply as a preventive, just as certain surgeons make out that we ought, to avoid the risk of appendicitis later on, to have all our appendices taken out when we are children.

But if no reply came from Morel, he could no longer sleep, he no longer knew a moment's peace of mind, so many in number, indeed, are the things that we experience without knowing them, and the profound inner realities that remain hidden from us.

When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain.

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

Friendship is in the end no more than: " . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."

Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.

People who laugh so heartily at what they themselves have said, when it is not funny, dispense us accordingly, by taking upon themselves the responsibility for the mirth, from joining in it.

The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.

People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.

The bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.

In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual, delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted, atrocious

Love is a reciprocal torture.

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians