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“Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.”
― Marcel Proust, The Captive / The Fugitive

“I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence...”
― Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove

“But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.”
― Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, Part 2

“I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinancy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“Reading Proust isn't just reading a book, it's an experience and you can't reject an experience.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“No doubt, few people understand either the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon of love, or how it creates a supplementary person who is quite different from the one who bears our beloved’s name in the outside world, and is mostly formed from elements within ourselves. So there are few who see anything natural in the disproportionate dimensions which we come to perceive in a person who is not the same as the one they see.”
― Marcel Proust

“...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

“Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.”
― Samuel Beckett

“What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? (Just to give you an idea, Proust's reply was 'To be separated from Mama.') I think that the lowest depth of misery ought to be distinguished from the highest pitch of anguish. In the lower depths come enforced idleness, sexual boredom, and/or impotence. At the highest pitch, the death of a friend or even the fear of the death of a child.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We’re increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.”
― Lev Grossman

“The belief that a person has a share in an unknown life to which his or her love may win us admission is, of all the prerequisites of love, the one which it values most highly and which makes it set little store by all the rest.”
― Marcel Proust

“Yet the Narrator’s quest is not only for his own identity and vocation. He seeks an understanding of art, sexuality and worldly and political affairs: he is a snoop and a voyeur; he comments and classifies; his taxonomic impulse makes the novel appear to be a vast compendium, replete with burrowing wasps and bedsteads, military strategies, stereoscopes, asparagus and aeroplanes.”
― Adam A. Watt, The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust

“Recalling, some time later, what I had felt at the time, I distinguished the impression of having been held for a moment in her mouth, myself, naked, without any of the social attributes which belonged equally to her other playmates and, when she used my surname, to my parents, accessories of which her lips - by the effort she made, a little after her father's manner, to articulate the words to which she wished to give a special emphasis - had the air of stripping, of divesting me, like the skin from a fruit of which one can swallow only the pulp, while her glance, adapting itself to the same new degree of intimacy as her speech, fell on me also more directly and testified to the consciousness, the pleasure, even the gratitude that it felt by accompanying itself with a smile.”
― marcel proust

“You're as strong as the Pont Neuf. You'll live to bury us all!”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“The variations of the Duchess's judgment spared no one, except her
husband. He alone had never been in love with her, in him she had
always felt an iron character, indifferent to the caprices that she
displayed, contemptuous of her beauty, violent, of a will that would
never bend, the sort under which alone nervous people can find
tranquillity.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“I loved her; I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to do her some injury, to force her to keep some memory of me.”
― Marcel Proust

“These new words were heard by my love; they persuaded it that the next day would not be different from what all the other days had been; that Gilberte’s feeling for me, already too old to be able to change, was indifference; that in my friendship with Gilberte, I was the only one who loved. “It’s true,â€� my love answered, “there’s nothing more to be done with this friendship, it won’t change.â€� And so, the very next day (or waiting for a public holiday if there was one coming up soon, or an anniversary, or the New Year perhaps, one of those days which are not like the others, when time makes a fresh start by rejecting the heritage of the past, by not accepting the legacy of its sorrows) I would ask Gilberte to give up our old friendship and lay the foundations of a new one.”
― Marcel Proust

“There was a mild, damp wind blowing. It was weather I was quite familiar with; and a sudden feeling and presentiment ran through me: that New Year’s Day was not a day that differed from any other, not the first day of a new life when I could remake the acquaintance of Gilberte with the die still uncast, as though on the very first day of Creation when no past yet existed, as though the sorrows she had sometimes caused me had been wiped out, and with them all the future ones they might portend, as though I lived in a new world in which nothing remained of the old except one thing: my wish that Gilberte would love me. I realized that, since my heart yearned in this way for the redesign of a universe which had not satisfied it, this meant that my heart had not changed; and I could see there was no reason why Gilberte’s should have changed either. I sensed that, though it was a new friendship for me, it would not be a new friendship for her, just as no years are ever separated from each other by a frontier, and that though[…]“it was a new friendship for me, it would not be a new friendship for her, just as no years are ever separated from each other by a frontier, and that though we may put different names to them, they remain beyond the reach of our yearnings, unaware of these and unaffected by them. Though I might dedicate this year to Gilberte, though I might try to imprint upon New Year’s Day the special notion I had made up for it, as a religion is superimposed on the blind workings of nature, it was in vain: I was aware that this day did not know it was called New Year’s Day, and that it was coming to an end in the twilight in a way that was not unknown to me. What I recognized, what I sensed “in that mild wind blowing about the Morris column with its posters, was the reappearance of former times, with the never-ending unchangingness of their substance, their familiar dampness, their ignorant fluidity.”
― Marcel Proust

“The words that passed between the girls of the little band and myself were not of any interest; they were, moreover, but few, broken by long spells of silence on my part. All of which did not prevent me from finding, in listening to them when the spoke to me, as much pleasure as in gazing at them, in discovering in the voice of each one of them a brightly colored picture. It was with ecstasy that I caught their pipings.”
― Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove

“The words that passed between the girls of the little band and myself were not of any interest; they were, moreover, but few, broken by long spells of silence on my part. All of which did not prevent me from finding, in listening to them when they spoke to me, as much pleasure as in gazing at them, in discovering in the voice of each one of them a brightly colored picture. It was with ecstasy that I caught their pipings.”
― Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove

“It was important that the objects of love be nothing but recipients, he thought again. Love was an outgoing thing, a gift that one should not expect to be returned. Stendhall must have said that, Proust certainly, using other words: a piece of wisdom his eyes had passed over reading.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Those Who Walk Away

“You can make a new version of what you love only by renouncing it.”
― Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume III - The Captive, The Fugitive, & Time Regained

“...spent the summer drowsing on his rooftop deck, smoking cigarettes, reading Proust, dreaming about death and indolence and beauty and time.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I went into the dining-room, where four covered pots of soup stood on the table, and moved over to the bookshelves to the left of the fireplace. Here I kept two or three dozen works on architecture and sculpture, and a hundred or so plain texts of the standard English and French poets, stopping chronologically well short of our own day: Mallarmé and Lord de Tabley are my most modern versifiers. I have no novelists, finding theirs a puny and piffling art, one that, even at its best, can render truthfully no more than a few minor parts of the total world it pretends to take as its field of reference. A man has only to feel some emotion, any emotion, anything differentiated at all, and spend a minute speculating how this would be rendered in a novel—not just the average novel, but the work of a Stendhal or a Proust—to grasp the pitiful inadequacy of all prose fiction to the task it sets itself. By comparison, the humblest productions of the visual arts are triumphs of portrayal, both of the matter and of the spirit, while verse—lyric verse, at least—is equidistant from fiction and life, and is autonomous.”
― Kingsley Amis, The Green Man

“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfalteringly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”
― Marcel Proust

“To takie miÅ‚e u pani, że pani nie jest wesoÅ‚a”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1

“Proust chamava a atenção, extasiado, para as incorreções na fala de Françoise e para o uso que ela fazia de palavras antigas da ±ôí²Ô²µ³Ü²¹.”
― Annie Ernaux

“No one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations between the visible and the invisible, in describing an idea that is not the contrary of the sensible, that is its lining and its depth.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“But genius, or even great talent, lies less in elements of mind and social refinement superior to those of others than in the ability to transform and transpose them. To heat a liquid with a flashlight, what is required is not the strongest possible torch, but one in which the current can be diverted from the production of light and adapted to the production of heat. To fly through the air, it is not necessary to have the most powerful motorcar, but a motor which, by turning its earthbound horizontal line into a vertical, can convert its speed along the ground into ascent. Likewise, those who produce works of genius are not those who spend their days in the most refined company, whose conversation is the most brilliant, or whose culture is the broadest; they are those who have the ability to stop living for themselves and make a mirror of their personality, so that their lives, however nondescript they may be socially, or even in a way intellectually, are reflected in it. For genius lies in reflective power, and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected. It was when the young Bergotte became capable of showing to the world of his readers the tasteless drawing room where he had spent his childhood, and the rather unamusing exchanges it had witnessed between himself and his brothers, that he rose above his wittier and more distinguished family friends. They could be driven home in their fine Rolls-Royces, sneering a little at the Bergottes and their vulgarities. But he, with his much less impressive flying machine, had at last taken off and soared over their heads.”
― PROUST M., In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower