Quotes About Proust

The thought of being made comfortable gives him strength to endure his pain.

This at once made up a gathering of several half-worthy individuals; and if a small patch of garden with a few trees,

I needed to live with the idea of the death of Albertine, with the idea of her misdeeds, for these ideas to become habitual, that is for me to be able to forget these ideas and finally forget Albertine herself.

But already there is the same fault, that paradox of stringing together fine-sounding words and only afterwards troubling about what they mean.

She took up the defence of the Republic, and against its anti-clericalism had not more to say than: "I should be equally annoyed whether they prevented me from hearing mass when I wanted to, or forced me to hear it when I didn't!

Love is nothing more perhaps than the stimulation of those eddies which, in the wake of an emotion, stir the soul

And I might, in order to justify myself, have told her that I loved her. But the confession of that love, apart from the fact that it could not have told Albertine anything new, would perhaps have made her colder to myself than the harshness and deceit for which love was the sole excuse. To be harsh and deceitful to the person whom we love is so natural!

If I have always been so much interested in dreams, is it not because, compensating duration with intensity they help us to understand better what is subjective in love?

Marcel Proust

The sight of Albertine's bare throat, of those too rosy cheeks, had so intoxicated me (that is to say had placed the reality of the world for me no longer in nature, but in the torrent of sensations that I could barely contain) that this sight had destroyed the equilibrium between the immense and indestructible life that circulated in my being and the life of the universe, so puny in comparison.

But we have looked too far ahead, for all this did not happen until after the Verdurins' party which we have interrupted, and we must go back to the point at which we left off.

as the saying is, climbing in opposition to my

Perhaps it is only people who can make us suffer a great deal who can offer us, in our hours of remission, that same, pacifying calm that nature can give.

I am not working for posterity, M. de Charlus replied, I am content with life, it is quite interesting enough, as poor Swann used to say.

linked all of a sudden to places from which I had thought it quite distinct, lost its mystery and took up its place in the region, leading me to reflect in terror that Mme Bovary and La Sanseverina9 would perhaps have struck me as creatures like any other had I come across them anywhere except in the enclosed atmosphere of a novel.

J'étais affreusement déçu, et l'idée qu'il était plus difficile et plus flatteur d'avoir une lettre de Bergotte ne me consolait en rien qu'elle ne fût pas de la laitière.

And thus for the first time my unhappiness was regarded no longer as a punishable offence but as an involuntary ailment which had been officially recognised, a nervous condition for which I was in no way responsible.

Probably what is wanting, the first time, is not comprehension but memory.

when he is not misunderstood by those around him, that the feeling on their part which proves that the superiority of his intelligence has compelled their recognition is not their admiration for his ideas, since these are beyond them, but their respect for his goodness.

Ponchour, Matame la marquise » avec le même accent qu'un concierge alsacien.

not for a triumph of dramatic artistry but for a manifestation of life;

the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the deepest slumber,

He was right: that intonation at any rate did convey a genuine and manifest effect, and should therefore have satisfied my desire to find irrefutable reasons for admiring La Berma. But it did not satisfy it, because of its very transparency

It was certainly not that I loved Albertine in the slightest: I knew that. Perhaps love is nothing but the ripple effect of those disturbances which, in the wake of an emotion, stir up the soul. My whole soul had been profoundly agitated when Albertine had told me, at Balbec, about Mlle Vinteuil, but these disturbances were over now. I no longer loved Albertine, for nothing remained of the pain, now cured,