-
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 -
I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.
Marcel Proust
-
Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.
Marcel Proust -
For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one no longer is.
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 -
We become moral when we are unhappy.
Marcel Proust -
Our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we have made it our duty to exercise them that if we come to engage in an activity of a different kind, it catches us off guard and without the slightest awareness that it might involve the application of those same virtues.
Marcel Proust -
For the writer as well as for the painter, style is not a question of technique, but of vision.
Marcel Proust
-
Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.
Marcel Proust -
The only paradise is paradise lost.
Marcel Proust -
It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.
Marcel Proust -
We believe we can change things according to our wishes because that's the only happy solution we can see. We don't think of what usually happens and what is also a happy solution; things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.
Marcel Proust -
Truth is a point of view about things.
Marcel Proust -
The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.
Marcel Proust
-
To a great extent, suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make itself familiar with a new state, which makes it uneasy, to adapt its sensibility to that state.
Marcel Proust -
They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.
Marcel Proust -
We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow.
Marcel Proust -
In summoning even the wisest of physicians to our aid, it is probably that he is relying upon a scientific "truth", the error of which will become obvious in just a few years' time.
Marcel Proust