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Marcel Proust

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    Marcel Proust

    A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.

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    Marcel Proust

    According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love.

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    Marcel Proust

    A certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our heart.

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    Marcel Proust

    A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dreams that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.

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    Marcel Proust

    A doctor who doesn't say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured.

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    Marcel Proust

    Adultery breathes new life into marriages which have been left for dead.

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    Marcel Proust

    A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

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    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.

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    Marcel Proust

    After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits become.

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    Marcel Proust

    A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.

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    Marcel Proust

    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

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    Marcel Proust

    All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

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    Marcel Proust

    All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they who have founded religions and created great works of art.

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    Marcel Proust

    All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

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    Marcel Proust

    A man may have spent his life among the great ones of the earth, who to him have been merely boring relatives or tedious acquaintances because a familiarity engendered in the cradle had stripped them of all glamour in his eyes.

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    Marcel Proust

    A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

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    Marcel Proust

    A man who falls straight into bed night after night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, I don't say great discoveries, but even minor observations about sleep. He scarcely knows that he is asleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.

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    Marcel Proust

    And indeed when we are no longer in love with women whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss of death between them and ourselves, just as much as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that we are no longer in love makes the people that they were or the person that we were then as good as dead?

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    Marcel Proust

    And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.

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    Marcel Proust

    And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.

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    Marcel Proust

    And wasn't my mind also like another crib in the depths of which I felt I remained ensconced, even in order to watch what was happening outside? When I saw an external object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.

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    Marcel Proust

    An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.

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    Marcel Proust

    An hour or so later he received a note from Odette. Swann had left his cigarette case at her house. "If only," she wrote, "you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have it back.

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    Marcel Proust

    Any mental activity is easy if it need not be subjected to reality.

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    Marcel Proust

    A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.

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    Marcel Proust

    A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.

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    Marcel Proust

    A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it. Partaking of the universal community of minds, it infiltrates, grafts itself on to, the mind of him who it refutes, among other contiguous ideas, with the aid of which, counter-attacking, he complements and corrects it; so that the final verdict is always to some extent the work of both parties to a discussion.

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    Marcel Proust

    A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

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    Marcel Proust

    Are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards the "seamy side" of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?

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    Marcel Proust

    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.

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    Marcel Proust

    As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

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    Marcel Proust

    A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute, but not remain as pure.

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    Marcel Proust

    As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.

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    Marcel Proust

    As to the pretty girls who went past, from the day on which I had first known that their cheeks could be kissed, I had become curious about their souls. And the Universe had appeared to me more interesting.

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    Marcel Proust

    At a certain age, we have already been struck by love; it no longer develops alone, according to its own mysteries and fateful laws while our hearts stand by startled and passive. We come to its assistanceRecognizing one of its symptoms, we recall, we bring back to life the others. Since we possess its song engraved in its totality within us, we do not need for a woman to tell us the beginning--filled with admiration inspired by beauty--to find the continuation.

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    Marcel Proust

    At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows; how small a thing her charm was for him now compared with the astounding terror that extended out from it like a murky halo, the immense anguish of not knowing at every moment what she had been doing, of not possessing her everywhere and always!

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    Marcel Proust

    At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.

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    Marcel Proust

    A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

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    Marcel Proust

    A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.

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    Marcel Proust

    A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.

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    Marcel Proust

    ...a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.

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    Marcel Proust

    Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.

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    Marcel Proust

    ... But all the feelings that evoke in us the joy or the misfortune of a real person are only produced in us through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist was in understanding that, in the apparatus of our emotions, since the image is the only essential element, the simplification which consists of purely and simply suppressing the factual characters is a definitive improvement.

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    Marcel Proust

    But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.

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    Marcel Proust

    But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years - and it opens.

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    Marcel Proust

    But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.

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    Marcel Proust

    But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.

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    Marcel Proust

    But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

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    Marcel Proust

    But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.

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    Marcel Proust

    Certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.