Books Quotes by Marcel Proust

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

— Marcel Proust

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.

— Marcel Proust

“True life life at last discovered and illuminated the only life therefore really lived that life is literature.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

“In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.”

— Marcel Proust

“myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles…

— Marcel Proust

“real books should be the offspring not of daylight and casual talk but of darkness and silence”

— Marcel Proust

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

— Marcel Proust

... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books,…

— Marcel Proust

“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them,…

— Marcel Proust

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to…

— Marcel Proust

“No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived…

— Marcel Proust

“A new book was not one of a number of similar objects, but was like an individual man, unmatched, and with no…

— Marcel Proust

“On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living…

— Marcel Proust

“She would make me tell her, too, all about the poems that I meant to compose. And these dreams reminded me that,…

— Marcel Proust

“There are certain original and distinguished authors in whom the least ‘freedom of speech’ is thought revolting because they have not begun…

— Marcel Proust

“We feel very strongly that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off and we could like him to…

— Marcel Proust

I blame the newspapers because every day they call our attention to insignificant things, while three or four times in our lives,we…

— Marcel Proust

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived…

— Marcel Proust

“Part of the beauty—and it is the original flaw in this type of literature, from which the famous Lundis are not exempt—lies…

— Marcel Proust

I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does…

— Marcel Proust

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he…

— Marcel Proust

“Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject…

— Marcel Proust

“It may be that I might have inferred from the pages that life teaches us to diminish the value of what we…

— Marcel Proust

“Whatever one may say, writing a novel is a very different thing from living one. All the same our lives are not…

— Marcel Proust

“What I fault newspapers for is that day after day they draw our attention to insignificant things whereas only three or four…

— Marcel Proust

“As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us…

— Marcel Proust

“For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would…

— Marcel Proust

“The idea that one will die is more painful than dying, but less painful than the idea that another person is dead,…

— Marcel Proust

“And more even than the painter, the writer, in order to achieve volume and substance, in order to attain to generality and,…

— Marcel Proust

In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which…

— Marcel Proust

None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we…

— Marcel Proust

“Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the region it described, I should have…

— Marcel Proust

“...the mode by which he "heard" the universe and projected it far beyond himself. Perhaps it was in this, I said to…

— Marcel Proust

“The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial…

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.

— Marcel Proust

“This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered.”

— Marcel Proust

Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers…

— Marcel Proust

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already…

— Marcel Proust