Quotes About Proust

Proust is interested in minutiae because life, as he sees it, is seldom ever about things but about our impression of things, not about facts but about the interpretation of facts, not about one particular feeling but about a confluence of conflicting feelings. Everything is elusive in Proust because nothing is ever certain.

That's what Proust calls it. On those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. That's the only real life, the only thing that makes you know you're alive - the backward ache. That's what music is.

Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied.

This being had only come to me, only manifested itself outside of activity and immediate enjoyment, on those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape the present. And only this being had the power to perform that task which had always defeated the efforts of my memory and my intellect, the power to make me rediscover days that were long past, the Time that was Lost.

Proust's Law (are you listening?) is twofold:(a) What least thing our self-love longs for mostOthers instinctively withhold;(b) Only when time has slain desireIs his wish granted to a smiling ghostNeither harmed nor warmed, now, by the fire.

I spent most of this weekend sitting on the sofa reading Proust. The only time my mother left her studio, which she locked behind her, was to go to Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt's house.

Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

Reading Proust isn't just reading a book, it's an experience and you can't reject an experience.

those who care about literature and mind must know the Hebrew Bible, Donne, Sterne and Jane Austen, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Proust and Kafka, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and (of course) Shakespeare, to start.

In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?

French schools follow a national curriculum that includes arduous surveys of French philosophy and literature. Frenchmen then spend the rest of their lives quoting Proust to one another, with hardly anyone else catching the references.

Ogni mediazione proietta un suo miraggio; i miraggi si susseguono come altrettante "verità" che subentrino alle verità anteriori come una vera e propria uccisione del ricordo vivente e si proteggano dalle verità future con una censura implacabile dell'esperienza quotidiana. Marcel Proust chiama "Io" i "mondi" proiettati dalle successive mediazioni. Gli Io sono perfettamente isolati gli uni dagli altri, incapaci di rammentarsi degli Io passati o di presagire gli Io futuri.

Now that the war looked as if it was going to last forever Ursula had decided she might as well embark on Proust.

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.

Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.

The twentieth century was wedded to the remembrance of things past, with Proust making the act of remembrance an art of sensory timeslip in the first texts which would become A la Recherche du Temps Perdu in 1913 and with Joyce making an epic forever out of a single passing ordinary day with the serialization of the first chapters of Ulysses not long after.

If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.

After Proust, there are certain things that simply cannot be done again. He marks off for you the boundaries of your talent.

I wonder what Proust would have made of our present-day locus of collective fantasy, the Internet. I'm guessing he would have seized on its wistful aspect, pointing out gently and with wry humor that much of what beguiles us is the act of reaching for what isn't there.

Das Leben ist zu kurz und Proust zu lang...

Werewolves were far more terrifying than vampires. It is probably the idea of seeing the human within the beast and knowing you can't reach it. It might as well be a great white shark. There is no sitting down and discussing Proust with it, which the traditional vampire model seems to leave room for. You can have a conversation.

There's nothing like taking Proust to the beach and daydreaming along to it.