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18c5df5
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At every new torment which is too hard to bear we feel yet another vein protrude, to unroll its sinuous and deadly length along our temples or beneath our eyes. And thus gradually are formed those terrible ravaged faces, of the old Rembrandt, the old Beethoven, at whom the whole world mocked. And the pockets under the eyes and the wrinkled forehead would not matter much were there not also the suffering of the heart. But since strength of o..
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Marcel Proust |
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6ee6a8e
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A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.
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writing
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Marcel Proust |
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778fdd2
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When he talked, there was a sort of mushy sound to his pronunciation that was charming because one sensed that it betrayed not so much an impediment in his speech as a quality of his soul, a sort of vestige of early childhood innocence that he had never lost. Each consonant he could not pronounce appeared to be another instance of a hardness of which he was incapable.
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Marcel Proust |
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836e646
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I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed.
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Marcel Proust |
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53926f0
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the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.
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proust
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Marcel Proust |
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2b260a9
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the warm glazes, the sparkling penumbra of the room itself and, through the little window framed with honeysuckle, in the rustic avenue, the resilient dryness of the sun-parched earth, veiled only by the diaphanous gauze woven of distance and the shade of the trees.
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Marcel Proust |
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6cafa38
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No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the eff..
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memory-trigger
metafiction
self
french
infinite
novel
memory
nostalgia
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Marcel Proust |
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80be22b
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The universe is true for us all and dissimilar to each of us.
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Marcel Proust |
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79ae842
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I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been - if the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not intervened - the means of communication between souls.
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Marcel Proust |
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64a8422
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I dined with Legrandin on the terrace of his house by moonlight. "There is a charming quality, is there not," he said to me, "in this silence; for hearts that are wounded, as mine is, a novelist whom you will read in time to come asserts that there is no remedy but silence and shadow. And you see this, my boy, there comes in all our lives a time, towards which you still have far to go, when the weary eyes can endure but one kind of light, t..
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Marcel Proust |
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3531d85
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My mother had to abandon her quest, but managed to extract from the restriction itself a further delicate thought, like good poets whom the tyranny of rhyme forces into the discovery of their finest lines.
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Marcel Proust |
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8004b7e
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Es mejor sonar una vida que vivirla, aunque vivirla siga siendo sonarla, pero menos misteriosamente y con menos claridad a la vez, con un sueno oscuro y pesado, similar al sueno disperso en la debil conciencia de los animales que rumian.
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vida
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Marcel Proust |
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7724755
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Maybe it is nothingness that is real and our entire dream is nonexistent, but in that case we feel that these phrases of music, and these notions that exist in relation to our dream, must also be nothing. We will perish, but we have for hostages these divine captives who will follow us and share our fate. And death in their company is less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps less probable.
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Marcel Proust |
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1f1236c
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I was not unhappy, except one day at a time.
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Marcel Proust |
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cb32838
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Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May.
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love
may
kisses
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Marcel Proust |
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38da9e4
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Each artist seems thus to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten, different from that from which will emerge, making for the earth, another great artist.
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Marcel Proust |
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abd809d
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Parties of this sort are as a rule premature. They have little reality until the following day, when they occupy the attention of the people who were not invited.
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Marcel Proust |
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df2d516
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There were some that were of so rare a beauty that my pleasure on catching sight of them was enhanced by surprise. By what privilege, on one morning rather than another, did the window on being uncurtained disclose to my wondering eyes the nymph Glauconome, whose lazy beauty, gently breathing, had the transparence of a vaporous emerald beneath whose surface I could see teeming the ponderable elements that coloured it? She made the sun join ..
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vacation
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Marcel Proust |
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2e162fd
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A person does not, as I had imagined, stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourselves (like a garden at which we gaze through a railing with all its borders spread out before us), but is a shadow which we can never penetrate, of which there can be no such thing as direct knowledge, with respect to which we form countless beliefs, based upon words and sometimes actio..
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Marcel Proust |
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dc674ce
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To know a thing does not always enable us to prevent it, but at least the things we know we do hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our minds, where we can dispose of them as we choose, and this gives us the illusion of a sort of power over them.
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Marcel Proust |
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76c9ef3
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My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mamma would come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good night lasted for so short a time, she went down again so soon, that the moment in which I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited straw, rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a moment of the utmost pain; fo..
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Marcel Proust |
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4999f45
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Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them. For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, w..
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Marcel Proust |
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58af360
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The so-called sensitivity of neurotics develops along with their egotism; they cannot bear for other people to flaunt the sufferings with which they are increasingly preoccupied themselves.
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suffering
neurotics
sensitivity
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Marcel Proust |
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2428d75
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So, by the working of a contradiction that was one only in appearance, it was at the very moment when I experienced an exceptional pleasure, when I sensed that my life could be one of fulfillment, and should therefore have seen it as having increased in value, that I felt liberated from the anxieties it had hitherto inspired in me, and was prepared to commit it without hesitation to the unsure hands of chance.
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Marcel Proust |
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5d09043
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When a belief vanishes, there survives it -- more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things -- a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause -- the death of the gods.
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Marcel Proust |
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7c0ac92
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Only, we must allow time. But our demands as far as time is concerned are no less exorbitant than those which the heart requires in order to change. For one thing, time is the very thing that we are least willing to allow, for our suffering is acute and we are anxious to see it brought to an end. And then, too, the time which the other heart will need in order to change will have been spent by our own heart in changing itself too, so that w..
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time
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Marcel Proust |
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c415af6
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Carried away in a sort of dream, he smiled, then he began to hurry back towards the lady; he was walking faster than usual, and his shoulders swayed backwards and forwards, right and left, in the most absurd fashion; altogether he looked, so utterly had he abandoned himself to it, ignoring all other considerations, as though he were the lifeless and wire-pulled puppet of his own happiness.
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swann-s-way
puppet
proust
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Marcel Proust |
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bb35bf4
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For a long time I used to go to bed early.
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Marcel Proust |
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13d5ddc
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In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life. And to make its flight perceptible novelists are obliged, by wildly accelerating the beat of the pendulum, to transport the reader in a couple of minutes over ten, or twenty, or even thirty years. At the top of one page we have left a lov..
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writing
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Marcel Proust |
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3ed1b10
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The air of those rooms was saturated with the fine bouquet of a silence so nourishing, so succulent, that I never went into them without a sort of greedy anticipation, particularly on those first mornings, chilly still, of the Easter holidays, when I could taste it more fully because I had only just arrived in Combray[...]
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combray
room
easter
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Marcel Proust |
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ac9bc7e
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While Elstir, at my request, went on painting, I wandered about in the half-light, stopping to examine first one picture, then another. Most of those that covered the walls were not what I should chiefly have liked to see of his work, paintings in what an English art journal which lay about on the reading-room table in the Grand Hotel called his first and second manners, the mythological manner and the manner in which he shewed signs of Jap..
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painting
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Marcel Proust |
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ebe3fa3
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w'drktu lmjl ldh~ ySTdm bh lHb, nn ntkhyl kmwDw` lh, ky'nan ymkn 'n ytmdWd 'mmn, mnGlqan Dmn jsd, y llHsr@, n mtdd hdh lky'n l~ kl lnqT f~ lzmn wlmkn hw m shGlh wyshGlh. wn lm ntmlk Slth bhdh lmkn 'w dhk bhdhh ls`@ 'w tlk, fnHn l ntmlWk lky'n. l 'nn l nstTy` lms kl hdhh lnqT. lw tm t`yynh ln fqT, lrbm wjdn wsyl@ llwSwl lyh, l 'nn ntlms lTryq lyh wl njdh. mn hn lshk wlGyr@ wlmDyqt. nn nbdd wqtan thmynan f~ lbHth `n 'dl@ Gyr m`qwl@, wnmr bjnb..
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Marcel Proust |
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3eb3ff8
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An impression is for the writer what an experiment is for the scientist, except that for the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes it, and for the writer it comes afterwards.
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science-and-art
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Marcel Proust |
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738c5f0
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Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as the great gust of agitation which, now and then, sweeps over the human spirit. For then the creature in whose company we are seeking amusement at the moment, her lot is cast, her fate and ours decided, that is the creature whom we shall henceforward love. It is not necessary that she should hav..
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love
exclusivity
description
possession
desire
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Marcel Proust |
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d7cfba8
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amwkht khh adm bh Gybt `dt mykhnd w yn `dt bh nbwdn `zyzn z nbwdnshn ngwrtr st.
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missing-someone
immigration
lost
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Marcel Proust |
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2ebff82
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This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever and new ones have formed that have given birth to new sorrows and joys which I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones have been difficult for me to understand. It was a very long time ago, too, that my father ceased to be ..
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Marcel Proust |
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64daee9
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Whenever she saw in others an advantage, however trivial, which she herself lacked, she would persuade herself that it was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity so as not to have to envy them.
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envy
pity
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Marcel Proust |
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6652761
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And more even than the painter, the writer, in order to achieve volume and substance, in order to attain to generality and, so far as literature can, to reality, needs to have seen many churches in order to paint one church and for the portrayal of a single sentiment requires many individuals. For if art is long and life is short, we may on the other hand say that, if inspiration is short, the sentiments which it has to portray are not of m..
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Marcel Proust |
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baaa41a
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She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That's the only way to get really good ones. And they're the rarest of luxuries.
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humor
class
elitism
society
servants
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Marcel Proust |
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9e95de0
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For regret, like desire, seeks not to analyse but to gratify itself. When one begins to love, one spends one's time, not in getting to know what one's love really is, but in arranging for tomorrow's rendezvous.
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Marcel Proust |
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a9a7033
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Truth and life are very difficult to fathom, and I retained of them, without really having got to know them, an impression in which sadness was perhaps actually eclipsed by exhaustion.
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Marcel Proust |
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8983368
|
Our love of life is only an old liaison of which we do not know how to rid ourselves. Its strength lies in its permanence. But death which severs it will cure us of the desire for immortality.
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Marcel Proust |
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a046f54
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Music] a pederast might hum when raping a choirboy.
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Marcel Proust |