Death Quotes by Marcel Proust

Memory nourishes the heart, and grief abates.

— Marcel Proust

“It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”

— Marcel Proust

Death is in truth an illness from which we recover

— Marcel Proust

“For every death is for others a simplification of life, it spares them the necessity of showing gratitude, the obligation of paying…

— Marcel Proust

“I felt that I did not really remember her except through the pain, and I longed for the nails that riveted her…

— Marcel Proust

“The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth…

— Marcel Proust

We shall see later on that the diversity of the forms of death that circulate invisibly is the cause of the peculiar…

— Marcel Proust

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

— Marcel Proust

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in…

— Marcel Proust

“We enjoy lovely music, beautiful paintings, a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented…

— Marcel Proust

“Our love of life is only an old liaison of which we do not know how to rid ourselves. Its strength lies…

— Marcel Proust

How can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we make a movement to preserve ourselves from death, in…

— Marcel Proust

L'ide e qu'on mourra est plus cruelle que mourir, mais moins que l'ide e qu'un autre est mort. The idea of dying…

— Marcel Proust

“For in this worldof ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more…

— Marcel Proust

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to…

— Marcel Proust

And indeed when we are no longer in love with women whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss…

— Marcel Proust

“But when a belief vanishes, there survives it—more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost…

— Marcel Proust

“This compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without result was so cruel that one day, noticing a swelling over his…

— 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

We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as…

— Marcel Proust

For women who do not love us, as for the "disappeared", knowing that we no longer have any hope does not prevent…

— Marcel Proust

Are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards the "seamy side" of death…

— Marcel Proust

The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at…

— Marcel Proust

I find very reasonable the Celtic belief that the souls of our dearly departed are trapped in some inferior being, in an…

— Marcel Proust

“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still…

— Marcel Proust

“A woman sees herself dying, in these cases not at the actual moment of death but months, sometimes years before, when death…

— Marcel Proust

“And it is because they contain thus within themselves the hours of the past that human bodies have the power to hurt…

— Marcel Proust

“We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say so we represent that hour to ourselves…

— Marcel Proust

“In that way Vinteuil's phrase, like some theme, say, in Tristan, which represents to us also a certain acquisition of sentiment, has…

— Marcel Proust

“We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as…

— Marcel Proust

“We passionately long for there to be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But…

— Marcel Proust

“From that evening, Swann understood that the feeling which Odette had once had for him would never revive, that his hopes of…

— Marcel Proust

There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still…

— Marcel Proust

“To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I…

— Marcel Proust

“But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more…

— Marcel Proust

“The suppression of suffering? Can I really have believed it, have believed that death merely strikes out what exists, and leaves everything…

— Marcel Proust

“This malady which Swann’s love had become had so proliferated, was so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his actions,…

— Marcel Proust

“The process which had begun in her - and in he a little earlier only than it must come to all of…

— Marcel Proust

“And the others too were beginning to remark in Swann that abnormal, excessive, shameful and deserved senescence of bachelors, of all those…

— Marcel Proust

“At every new torment which is too hard to bear we feel yet another vein protrude, to unroll its sinuous and deadly…

— Marcel Proust