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Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.
Marcel Proust -
The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.
Marcel Proust
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A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain.
Marcel Proust -
Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones.
Marcel Proust -
Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.
Marcel Proust -
The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.
Marcel Proust -
It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.
Marcel Proust -
The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.
Marcel Proust
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Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
Marcel Proust -
After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's Pensées in an advertisement for soap.
Marcel Proust -
Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.
Marcel Proust -
How else learn the real, if not by inventing what might lie outside it?
Marcel Proust -
Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.
Marcel Proust -
When we build ... let it not be for present delights nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think ... that a time is to come when these stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor, and the wrought substance of them, See! This our fathers did for us!
Marcel Proust
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Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
Marcel Proust -
We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment.
Marcel Proust -
When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.
Marcel Proust -
She poured out Swann's tea, inquired "Lemon or cream?" and, on his answering "Cream, please," said to him with a laugh: "A cloud!" And as he pronounced it excellent, "You see, I know just how you like it." This tea had indeed seemed to Swann, just as it seemed to her; something precious, and love has such a need to find some justification for itself, some guarantee of duration, in pleasures which without it would have no existence and must cease with its passing.
Marcel Proust -
The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.
Marcel Proust -
We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her.
Marcel Proust
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Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.
Marcel Proust -
Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.
Marcel Proust -
Photography is the product of complete alienation.
Marcel Proust -
She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.
Marcel Proust