Marcel Proust Quotes - Page 3

And so her parents-in-law, whom she still regarded as the most eminent people in France, declared that she was an angel; all the more so because they preferred to appear, in marrying their son to her, to have yielded to the attraction rather of her natural charm than of her considerable fortune.

Her [Odette's] eyes were beautiful, but so large they seemed to droop beneath their own weight, strained the rest of her face and always made her appear unwell or in a bad mood.

You know Balbec so well - do you have friends in the area?'
I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.'
That is not what I meant,' interrupted my father, as obstinate as the trees and as pitiless as the sky.

What had to move - a leaf of the chestnut tree, for instance - moved.

For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart.

But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real point of intersection between reality and dream.

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.

It's far more difficult to disfigure a great work of art than to create one.

Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.

She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive.

I felt that I did not really remember her except through the pain, and I longed for the nails that riveted her to my consciousness to be driven yet deeper.

How often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay flat on his back in the bottom of the boat, letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky gliding slowly by above him, his face aglow with a foretaste of happiness and peace!

After a certain age, and even if we develop in quite different ways, the more we become ourselves, the more our family traits are accentuated.

...we need to bear in mind that our opinion of other people, our ties with friends or family, have only the semblance of fixity and are, in fact, as eternally fluid as the sea.

I came to recognise that, apart from her [Françoise's] own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself.

Gardeners produce flowers that are delicious dreams, and others too that are like nightmares.

But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.

Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.

We needed germans in Paris to hear Wagner.

Good God! Think of listening to Wagner for a whole fortnight with a woman who takes about as much interest in music as a tone-deaf newt - that would be fun!