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Feeling Quote by Marcel Proust

“As for me, I feel myself living and thinking in a room where everything is the creation and the language of lives profoundly different from mine, of a taste opposite to mine, where I find nothing of my conscious thought, where my imagination is excited by feeling itself plunged into the depths of…” quote by Marcel Proust
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““As for me, I feel myself living and thinking in a room where everything is the creation and the language of lives profoundly different from mine, of a taste opposite to mine, where I find nothing of my conscious thought, where my imagination is excited by feeling itself plunged into the depths of the non-ego; I feel happy only when setting foot—on the Avenue de la Gare, on the Port, or on the Place de l'Eglise—in one of those provincial hotels with cold, long corridors where the wind from outside contends successfully with the efforts of the heating system, where the detailed geographic map of the district is still the sole ornament on the walls, where each noise helps only to make the silence appear by displacing it, where the rooms keep a musty perfume which the open air comes to wash, but does not eliminate, and which the nostrils inhale a hundred times in order to bring it to the imagination, which is enchanted with it, which has it pose like a model to try to recreate it with all the thoughts and remembrances that it contains...””

Marcel Proust

About This Quote

Source Novel: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 3, 1919

The narrator feels alienated in a foreign environment, finding comfort only in stark, sensory-rich hotel spaces that evoke memory and imagination.

In simple terms: He feels at home only in cold, noisy hotels that stimulate his imagination.

Key Takeaway

Seek environments that awaken your senses.

Themes

alienation memory sensory experience imagination place

Mood

melancholic reflective

Type

literary philosophical

When to use this quote

  • travel
  • writing
  • creative inspiration
  • urban exploration

Key Concepts

existentialism phenomenology psychology

Questions to Reflect On

  • How do unfamiliar settings shape your inner world?
  • What sensory details ground your imagination?
A Different Perspective

The comfort described may be fleeting and tied to nostalgia.

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