Quotes About Proust

For a long time I would go to bed early. [Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.]

Proust fared better. "I cannot even begin to tell you how much pleasure we both derive from the mere presence of LA RECHERCHE in our dwelling," Véra thanked her husband's Gallimard editor, but this before she had begun the Maurois-edited volume, into which she was appalled to see that a great number of slips and misprints had crept. She could not help it; hers was the kind of eye to which typos positively leapt.

El pasado, decía Proust, no sólo es fugaz, es que no se mueve de sitio. Con París pasa lo mismo, jamás ha salido de viaje. Y encima es interminable, no se acaba nunca.

When we talk of memory of food, we generally assume that nostalgia is a phenomenon that occurs late in life - like Proust being transported to his youth by a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea. But food memory is there from the start. Even babies have nostalgia!

Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer. They control the most simple Proustian episode, and an understanding of their mechanism must precede any particular analysis of their application.

I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time.

I know of no better definition of love than the one given by Proust - Love is space and time measured by the heart.

It is Proust's implacable honesty, his reluctance to cut corners or to articulate what might have been good enough or credible enough in any other writer that make him the introspective genius he is.

I find it's impossible for me to read Proust.

Proust writes, he remembers, physically. He depends on his body to give him the information that will bring him to the past. His book is called 'In Search of Lost Time,' and he does it through the senses. He does it through smell. He does it through feeling. He does it through texture. It is all physically driven, that language.

Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.

For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

You can't read Proust at the Laundromat.

One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if it shows itself capable of accomodating one's love; and jealously, because it can become the image of one's limitations in time and space, and yet can give the Proustian blessing of more life.

How about Proust's In Search of Lost Time? Tamaru asked. If you've never read it this would be a good opportunity to read the whole thing. Have you read it? No, I haven't been in jail, or had to hide out for a long time. Someone once said unless you have those kinds of opportunities, you can't read the whole of Proust.

I identify myself as what I am. I'm half Jewish, like Proust. I have no other way to put it.

Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel.

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

Though a prose writer (of over fifty novels and a journalist and memoirist of forty books of nonfiction), Colette (1873–1954) lives on in literary history as the poet of the flesh—male, female, androgynous, young, aging, old, animal, vegetable. Proust, who praised her "voluptuous and bitter" soul, wept over some of her pages, André Gide "devoured [her] at a gulp.

A novel should be like a street full of strangers, where no more than two or three people are known to us in depth. Look at writers like Proust. They knew how to use minor characters to humiliate, to belittle their protagonists.

Like Proust I want to escape from the eternal push and rattle of time into the coolness and poise of a work of art. (Agreeing with Huxley for once, I think it is not what one has experienced, but what one does with what one has experienced that matters. The only possible doctrine of course for one who has experienced remarkably little of the big world!)

Monsieur de Norpois is made to be ashamed of the fact that he expressed a different opinion. Proust did not consider that the diplomat might have changed his mind. We

This is the flow of time familiar from our experience. It is inside there that it nestles. Inside of us. The utterly crucial presence of traces of the past in our neurons. Proust could not be more explicit on this matter. Writing in the first book, "Reality is formed only by memory" and memory in its turn is a collection of traces-an indirect product of the disordering of the world.

I know the secrets; I dig Joyce and Proust above Melville and Celine.