Marcel Proust - Swann's Way (1913)

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Once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime flowers which my aunt used to give me... immediately the old gray house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater.

Marcel Proust
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

Marcel Proust
Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.

Marcel Proust
I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake … suddenly the memory returns. The taste was of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray … my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea.

Marcel Proust
The heart changes...but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.

Marcel Proust
There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.

Marcel Proust
A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

Marcel Proust
There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.

Marcel Proust
When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.

Marcel Proust
Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.

Marcel Proust
A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

Marcel Proust
She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.

Marcel Proust
We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

Marcel Proust
Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

Marcel Proust
The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.

Marcel Proust
Do you suppose that it is within your power to insult me? You evidently are not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips of my august toes?

Marcel Proust
Similarly the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is most brilliant, or their culture broadest, but those who have had the power, ceasing in a moment to live only for themselves, to make use of their personality as of a mirror.

Marcel Proust
Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.

Marcel Proust
The courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the "other side.

Marcel Proust
Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.

Marcel Proust
There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning -- without altogether recognizing it beneath the disguise of ambiguous behavior which it assumes in his presence.

Marcel Proust
The smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us.....

Marcel Proust
We scornfully decline, because of one whom we love and who will some day be of so little account, to see another who is of no account to-day, with whom we shall be in love to-morrow, with whom we might, perhaps, had we consented to see her now, have fallen in love a little earlier and who would thus have put a term to our present sufferings, bringing others, it is true, in their place.

Marcel Proust
Like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern.

Marcel Proust
For a long time I would go to bed early.
In French: Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.

Marcel Proust
We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

Marcel Proust
Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.

Marcel Proust
The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilising the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply.

Marcel Proust
Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.

Marcel Proust
There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.

Marcel Proust