Quotes About Proust

Proust's is a long book, though, water- skiing permitting, you could get through it in the summer recess

As Marcel Proust understood, it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.

Proust is even harsher on the same subject with the university professor Brichot. Like Françoise, Brichot never connects his reading to his inner life, and therefore fails to grasp the universal beauty and truth of certain texts. His being a professor of literature makes the posturing, petty criticism, and lack of insight particularly shocking.

Le risoluzioni definitive si prendono sempre e soltanto per uno stato d'animo che non è destinato a durare. — Chi l'ha detto? — Marcel Proust. Non sbagliava mai, quello.

We all have Proustian moments, but don't really know about it until we read Proust.

Alain de Botton has written a book called How Proust Can Change Your Life, a title that I suspect was devised with at least some tongue in cheek but that speaks, nonetheless, to a very real possibility of personal transformation. The title of this book is in a way lighthearted homage to de Botton's remarkable book.

Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust

Pour comprendre le génie de Proust, il faut avoir vécu cela, Albertine disparue. Je revis vraiment La prisonnière et Albertine disparue (La fugitive, comme titre, me plaît moins).

De huit heures à dix heures, c'est le noir, il n'appelle pas et j'attends. Voilà. Et je ne pense même pas à ce moment-là, comme Proust, qu'il suffirait d'un rien, d'un peu de volonté, pour ne plus souffrir, crever ce cerceau de papier au-delà duquel je serais libre.

I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.

No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy –that is to say, has given so complete a picture of man's life, both on its domestic and heroic side. No English novelist has explored man's soul as deeply as Dostoyevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analysed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust.

In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book 'How Proust Can Change Your Life.' I was charmed by it. I remember using it in a course on cultural criticism for a graduate class that had a mix of theorists and creative writers.

Woman brings pain. Woman is evil. There are no exceptions. I tell you, even the angels are liars. What does Proust say? "We lie all our lives, and more especially, only perhaps, to those whom we love." Open your Proust. I have underlined it for you.

Make the Last Book the first of a series—a life job, like Proust's.

The dogs bark at night. The garden smells of honeysuckle in the summer, of wet leaves in the winter. One hears the whistle of the small train from and to Paris. It is a train which looks ancient, as if it were still carrying the personages of Proust's novels to dine in the country.

There is no privileged state which allows us to transcend time; and this was where Proust made his great mistake. A state such as he describes has only the value of a foretaste. This notion of a foretaste is, I feel, likely to play a more and more central part in my thinking.

It is desire that engenders belief and if we fail as a rule to take this into account, it is because most of the desires that create beliefs end only with our own life.

not required to stay late in the Whitehall area, I used, as a general routine, to come straight back from duty to a nearby pub, dine there, then retire to bed with a book. At that period the seventeenth century particularly occupied me, so that works like Wood's Athenae Oxonienses or Luttrell's Brief Relation opened up vistas of the past, if not necessarily preferable to one's own time, at least appreciably different. These historical readings could be varied with Proust.

Le temps, par son cours, use et détruit ce qui est temporel. Aussi y-a-t-il plus d'éternité dans le passé que dans le présent. Valeur de l'histoire bien comprise analogue à celle du souvenir dans Proust. Ainsi le passé nous présente quelque chose qui est à la fois réel et meilleur que nous, et qui peut nous tirer ver le haut, ce que l'avenir ne fait jamais.

As Proust put it, the only paradises are those we have lost.

Perimate la Proust sunt acele fleacuri umflate de un delir prolix, damfurile stilului simbolist, aglomerarea de efecte, saturaÅ£ia poetic?. E ca ÅŸi cum un Saint-Simon ar fi suferit influenÅ£a PreÅ£ioaselor. Nimeni nu l-ar mai citi în ziua de azi.

I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating 'Swann's Way.' There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences.

I want my thoughts to be an incentive for the reader to give his or her own thoughts. After I wrote 'Proust and the Squid,' I received truly hundreds of letters - I'm still receiving them - and the letters that I wrote back helped me formulate my thinking around things I know are important to others.