“Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the region it described, I should have… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book. — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“We feel very strongly that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off and we could like him to… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author. — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“She would make me tell her, too, all about the poems that I meant to compose. And these dreams reminded me that,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“It may be that I might have inferred from the pages that life teaches us to diminish the value of what we… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“Whatever one may say, writing a novel is a very different thing from living one. All the same our lives are not… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“real books should be the offspring not of daylight and casual talk but of darkness and silence” — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“...and he would have also to endure his book like a form of fatigue, to accept it like a discipline, build it… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“Well, how could a reader notice that? There may be something lacking there I admit. But heavens above, they ought to count… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“What I fault newspapers for is that day after day they draw our attention to insignificant things whereas only three or four… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“True life life at last discovered and illuminated the only life therefore really lived that life is literature.” — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“It seemed to me that the beauty of the trees was hers also, and that, as for the spirit of those horizons,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
Pour e crire ce livre essentiel, le seul livre vrai, un grand e crivain n'a pas, dans le sens courant, a' l'inventer… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“A new book was not one of a number of similar objects, but was like an individual man, unmatched, and with no… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“They buried him, but all through the night of mourning, in the lighted windows, his books arranged three by three kept watch… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“There are certain original and distinguished authors in whom the least ‘freedom of speech’ is thought revolting because they have not begun… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“machinery' of life at Versailles; and was able, too, to persuade herself that her silence, a shade of good humour or of arrogance on… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“For her [Françoise], wealth was like a necessary condition without which virtue would lack both merit and charm. She made so little distinction between… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
Knowing does not always allow us to prevent, but at least the things that we know, we hold them, if not in our hands,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind. — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
...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… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything, the brain… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“Art extracted from the most familiar reality does indeed exist and its domain is perhaps the largest of any.” — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
I find very reasonable the Celtic belief that the souls of our dearly departed are trapped in some inferior being, in an animal, aplant,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“When you heard anyone in the middle of a talk which was being deliberately kept off the Affair announce furtively some piece of political… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“We betroth ourselves by proxy, and then feel obliged to marry the intermediary.” — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“But the old lady on the contrary, far from justifying her daughter’s fears, felt every time someone of her own age “disappeared” that she… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
