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The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams.
Marcel Proust -
Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.
Marcel Proust
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I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me.
Marcel Proust -
In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.
Marcel Proust -
The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
Marcel Proust -
The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.
Marcel Proust -
Not caring for their lives' is it? Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.
Marcel Proust -
We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.
Marcel Proust
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... in love, barriers cannot be destroyed from the outside by the one to whom the cause despair, no matter what he does; and it isonly when he is no longer concerned with them that, suddenly, as a result of work coming from elsewhere, accomplished within the one who did not love him, these barriers, formerly attacked without success, fall futilely.
Marcel Proust -
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
Marcel Proust -
The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist (our friends being friends only in the light of an agreeable folly which travels with us through life and to which we readily accommodate ourselves, but which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes that it is alive.).
Marcel Proust -
A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.
Marcel Proust -
How can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we make a movement to preserve ourselves from death, in a world where love is provoked by a lie and consists solely in the need of having our sufferings appeased by whatever being has made us suffer?
Marcel Proust -
The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other.
Marcel Proust
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To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion.
Marcel Proust -
For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that personal recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom, and I have been led to believe, and to make someone else believe, in a renewal of affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel.
Marcel Proust -
Friendship is in the end no more than: " . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."
Marcel Proust -
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
Marcel Proust -
Lies are essential to humanity.
Marcel Proust -
We become moral when we are unhappy.
Marcel Proust
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You know Balbec so well - do you have friends in the area?' I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.' That is not what I meant,' interrupted my father, as obstinate as the trees and as pitiless as the sky.
Marcel Proust -
Habit! that skillful but slow arranger, which starts out by letting our spirit suffer for weeks in a temporary state, but that thespirit is after all happy to discover, for without habit and reduced to its own resources, the spirit would be unable to make any lodgings seem habitable.
Marcel Proust -
I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.
Marcel Proust -
Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.
Marcel Proust