Quotes About Proust

I grew up reading Proust all my life, and he's very dear to me.

As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.

Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf. She loved his novel, but loved it rather too much. There wasn't enough wrong with it—a crushing recognition when one considers Walter Benjamin's assessment of why people become writers: because they are unable to find a book already written that they are completely happy with. And

It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.

For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit.

It was a symbol of what Ruskin had done for Proust, and what all books might do for their readers, namely bring back to life, from the deadness caused by habit and inattention, valuable yet neglected aspects of experience.

The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding, even if, as Proust warns is, 'when we discover the true lives of other people, the real world beneath the world of appearance, we get as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which is full of hidden treasures, torture-chambers or skeletons.

The more tempting kind of beauty has only a few angles from which it may be glimpsed, and then not in all lights and at all times. It flirts dangerously with ugliness, it takes risks with itself, it does not side comfortably with mathematical rules of proportion, it draws its appeal from precisely those details that also lend themselves to ugliness. As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.

He (Proust) tells us, for instance, that there are two methods by which a person can acquire wisdom, painlessly via a teacher or painfully via life, and he proposes that the painful variety is far superior... We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us.

If, as Proust suggests, we are obliged to create our own language, it is because there are dimensions to ourselves absent from clichés, which require us to flout etiquette in order to convey with greater accuracy the distinctive timbre of our thought.

The only way to defend language is to attack it....' - Proust. Every good writer in history had, in order to ensure adequate expression, broken a range of rules laid down by previous writers.

So if speaking in clichés is problematic, it is because the world itself contains a far broader range of rainfalls, moons, sunshines, and emotions than stock expressions either capture or teach us to expect. Proust's novel is filled with people who behave in un-stock ways.

fabrication de la petite madeleine de Marcel Proust». Un paquete de ocho

It is surprising to find that Proust held some extremely caustic views about friendship- in fact, to find that he had an unusually limited conception of the value of his, or indeed anyone's friendships.

Proust was not well place to enjoy honest friendships. For a start, he had far too many true but unkind thoughts about people.

It is, unfortunately, easier to lose a lover than complete In Search of Lost Time.

It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not to look at his world through our eyes.

Proust's suspicion of doctors... in an awkward position...for they are people who profess to understand the workings of the body, even though their knowledge has not primarily emerged from any pain in their own body.

Instead of urging us to place the same value on all things, Proust might more interestingly have been encouraging us to ascribe them their correct value, and hence to revise certain notions of the good life, which risked inspiring an unfair neglect of some settings and a misguided enthusiasm for others.

A genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.

But why would readers seek to be the readers of their own selves? Why does Proust privilege the connection between ourselves and works of art, as much in his novel as in his museum habits? One answer is because it is the only way in which art can properly affect rather than simply distract us from life

at least to resist the approach of Alfred Humblot at Ollendorf and Jacques Madeleine at Fasquelle, which Proust defined as, 'the self-satisfaction felt by busy men - however idiotic their business - at not having time to do what you are doing'.

Happiness is good for the body," Proust tells us, "but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.

The happiness which may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception, it reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.