“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there. — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered.” — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“precisely the same way the pastoral novels of George Sand, which she was giving me for my birthday, were regular lumber-rooms of… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“The idea that one will die is more painful than dying, but less painful than the idea that another person is dead,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“It was evident to me then that I existed in the same manner as all other men, that I must grow old,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self. — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books,… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“...the mode by which he "heard" the universe and projected it far beyond himself. Perhaps it was in this, I said to… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“But the true nature which we repress continues nevertheless to abide within us. Thus it is that at times, if we read… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“… it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because… — Marcel Proust Copy Share Image
“Days in the past cover up little by little those that preceded them and are themselves buried beneath those that follow them.… — 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
