Marcel Proust Quotes

“Some details in life may look insignificant but appear to be vital leitmotifs in a person's life. They may have the value of "Rosebuds" of Citizen Kane or "Madeleine cookies" of Marcel Proust or "Strawberry fields" of the Beatles. People regularly walk down the memory lane of their early youth. The paper boats of their childhood are recurrently floating on the waves of their mind and bring back the mood and the spirit of the early days. They enable us to retreat from the trivial, daily worries and can generate delightful bliss and true joy in a sometimes frantic and chaotic life. ("Paper boats forever" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“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, Du côté de chez Swann

“Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.”
― Truman Capote, Conversations with Capote

“My only consolation when I am really sad is to love and to be loved.”
― Marcel Proust

“The problem with cliches is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Cliches are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“Kilmartin wrote a highly amusing and illuminating account of his experience as a Proust revisionist, which appeared in the first issue of Ben Sonnenberg's quarterly Grand Street in the autumn of 1981. The essay opened with a kind of encouragement: 'There used to be a story that discerning Frenchmen preferred to read Marcel Proust in English on the grounds that the prose of A la recherche du temps perdu was deeply un-French and heavily influenced by English writers such as Ruskin.' I cling to this even though Kilmartin thought it to be ridiculous Parisian snobbery; I shall never be able to read Proust in French, and one's opportunities for outfacing Gallic self-regard are relatively scarce.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“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

“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

“For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“It is not the contented or the glowing who have left many of the profound testimonies of what it means to be alive. It seems that such knowledge has usually been the privileged preserve of, and the only blessing granted to, the violently miserable.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“And what lies unknown within us includes such surprising things as ships that go through towns, seas that are momentarily indistinguishable from skies, fantasies that our beloved family will die in a major conflagration, and intense feelings of love sparked by contact with smooth skin.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 3: Sodom and Gomorrah & The Captive

“I veri paradisi sono i paradisi che abbiamo perduto.”
― Marcel Proust

“Though we sometimes suspect that people are hiding things from us, it is not until we are in love that we feel an urgency to press our inquiries, and in seeking answers, we are apt to discover the extent to which people disguise and conceal their real selves.”
― Alain de Botton

“The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding, even if, as Proust warns is, 'when we discover the true lives of other people, the real world beneath the world of appearance, we get as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which is full of hidden treasures, torture-chambers or skeletons.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“If only I could value myself more! Alas! It is impossible.”
― Marcel Proust

“I do my intellectual work within myself, and once with other people, it's more or less irrelevant to me that they're intelligent, as long as they are kind, sincere etc."”
― Marcel Proust

“Eventually... for me by the time you're 25 or so, you just start running out of shit to do. Books to read... people to meet. I was too chicken to be an "entrepreneur" in college and I wish that back then someone told me... stressed to me, that if you score above a certain percentile on the SAT.... you just won't be running into too many people... who have the credibility to tell you what to do. And they say I can't Drink anymore, either. So now... what?”
― Dmitry Dyatlov

“ I wrote my first novel, McFarlane Boils The Sea, under the influence of Kelman and Proust, which is like drinking a cocktail of Bowmore and Châteauneuf du Pape.
(James Meek in interview with TMO)”
― James Meek

“The moral? To recognize that our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“Friends afford us a change to express our deepest selves, and that the conversations we have with them are a privileged forum in which to say what we really think and, by extension and with no mystical allusion, be who we really are.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“Love? I make it often, but I never talk about it.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 3: Sodom and Gomorrah & The Captive

“When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 3: Sodom and Gomorrah & The Captive

“...and in the spell
Of Proust's great paragraphs we hear and see
The ocean into which we all, as he did,
Must sink back, our achievements left behind –
Whether a necessary task fulfilled
Or else whole symphonies – and be reclaimed
By nature, which has no mind of its own
But simply makes us welcome, as the ashes
Of Maria Callas, spread on the Agean,
Were first a cloud, and then a mist, then nothing
But an everlasting song reduced to atoms
Which, though they drift apart, are still together
In the memories of those of us who live.”
― Clive James, Gate of Lilacs: A Verse Commentary on Proust

“It is, unfortunately, easier to lose a lover than complete In Search of Lost Time.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“It is surprising to find that Proust held some extremely caustic views about friendship- in fact, to find that he had an unusually limited conception of the value of his, or indeed anyone's friendships.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“Proust was not well place to enjoy honest friendships. For a start, he had far too many true but unkind thoughts about people.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“A timeless lecture changes one thought into another letter.”
― Petra Hermans, Voor een betere wereld

“The sound of the sea you hear in Proust, as if the whole book were a shell held to your ear, is the sound of the amniotic fluid, reminding you, across all your barriers of self-protection, that the first thing you ever heard was voices in the water.”
― Clive James, Gate of Lilacs: A Verse Commentary on Proust