Top 100 Proust's Quotes
#1. It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
Theodor Adorno
#2. Hence Proust's assertion that the greatness of works of art has nothing to do with the apparent quality of their subject matter, and everything to do with the subsequent treatment of that matter.
Alain De Botton
#3. Proust's life changed due to a very large inheritance he received (in today's terms, a principal of about $6 million, with a monthly income of about $15,000).
Marcel Proust
#4. His life and family circle changed considerably between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust's brother Robert married and left the family apartment. His father died in September of the same year. Finally, and most crushingly, Proust's beloved mother died in September 1905.
Marcel Proust
#5. By itself, an ordinary snapshot is no less banal than the petite madeleine in Proust's In Search of Lost Time ... but as goad to memory, it is often the first integer in a sequence of recollections that has the power to deny time for the sake of love.
Michael Lesy
#6. Proust's tea cake has nothing on one hour in a college dorm.
Gloria Steinem
#7. We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.
Oliver Sacks
#8. Proust's is a long book, though, water- skiing permitting, you could get through it in the summer recess
Alan Bennett
#9. My work comprises one vast book like Proust's except that my remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sick bed.
Jack Kerouac
#10. I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating 'Swann's Way.' There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences.
Lydia Davis
#12. Many of the most accomplished people of our era were considered by experts to have no future. Jackson Pollock, Marcel Proust, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Lucille Ball, and Charles Darwin were all thought to have little potential for their chosen fields.
Carol S. Dweck
#13. one can grow so well accustomed as to smile at them, to take the tormentor's side with a. happy determination which deludes one into the belief that it is not, really, tormenting;
Marcel Proust
#14. Because the erotic frisson is such that the kiss that you only imagine giving,can be as powerful and as enchanting as hours of actual lovemaking. As Marcel Proust said, it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.
Esther Perel
#15. A writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.
Marcel Proust
#16. In the V-shaped opening of her crape bodice Mlle. Vinteuil felt the sting of her friend's sudden kiss; ...
Marcel Proust
#18. Do you imagine that the poisonous spittle of five hundred little men of your sort, hoisted on to each other's shoulders, could even drool down on to the tips of my august toes?
Marcel Proust
#19. She can't have understood you: you are so utterly different from ordinary men. That's what I liked about you when I first saw you; I felt at once that you weren't like everybody else.
Marcel Proust
#20. One reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one's eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one s mistress.
Marcel Proust
#21. That's what Proust calls it. On those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. That's the only real life, the only thing that makes you know you're alive - the backward ache. That's what music is.
Adam Haslett
#22. Auteuil (the southern sector of Paris's then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian W
Marcel Proust
#23. If I hadn't read all of Jane Austen and DH Lawrence, Tolstoy and Proust, as well as the more fun stuff, I wouldn't know how to break bad news, how to sympathise, how to be a friend or a lover, because I wouldn't have any idea what was going on in anybody else's mind.
Sebastian Faulks
#24. We ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people's views are never in accordance with our own.
Marcel Proust
#25. After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits become.
Marcel Proust
#26. But the presence of Odette continued to sow in Swann's heart alternate seeds of love and suspicion.
Marcel Proust
#27. Fall in love with a dog's bum,
And thou'll think it pretty as a plum.
Marcel Proust
#28. She [Mme Sazerat] did not offer her hand, but smiled at my mother with vague melancholy as one smiles at a playmate from one's childhood, but with whom all connection has been severed because she has lived a debauched life, married a jailbird or, worse still, a divorced man.
Marcel Proust
#29. I had spent the New Year's Day of old men, who differ on that day from their juniors, not because people have ceased to give them presents but because they themselves have ceased to believe in the New Year.
Marcel Proust
#30. Not caring for their lives' is it?
Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.
Marcel Proust
#31. My dear Madame, I just noticed that I forgot my cane at your house yesterday; please be good enough to give it to the bearer of this letter. P.S. Kindly pardon me for disturbing you; I just found my cane.
Marcel Proust
#32. There is no doubt that a person's charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: 'No, this evening I shan't be free'.
Marcel Proust
#33. It's a funny thing, now; I very often think of my poor wife, but I cannot think of her very much at any one time." "Often, but a little at a time, like poor old Swann," became one of my grandfather's favourite phrases, which he would apply to all kinds of things.
Marcel Proust
#34. I concluded all the same from this first evening that his [Morel's] must be a vile nature, that he would not shrink from any act of servility if the need arose, and was incapable of gratitude. In which he resembled the majority of mankind.
Marcel Proust
#35. He wanted to know all about me and my family and especially my childhood.
"That's where everything starts," he'd say. "Both heaven and hell.
Celeste Albaret
#36. Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
Marcel Proust
#37. Well, how could a reader notice that? There may be something lacking there I admit. But heavens above, they ought to count themselves lucky! It's full enough of good things as it is, far more than they usually get.
Marcel Proust
#38. 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.
Marcel Proust
#39. Depth of character, or a melancholy expression on a woman's face would freeze his senses, which would, however, immediately melt at the sight of healthy, abundant, rosy human flesh.
Marcel Proust
#40. My life had been like a painter who climbs up a road overhanging a lake that is hidden from view by a screen of rocks and trees. Through a gap he glimpses it, he has it all there in front of him, he takes up his brushes.
Marcel Proust
#41. When you work to please others you can't succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone's interest.
Marcel Proust
#42. Be making her tea; or, if my aunt were feeling 'upset,' she would ask instead for her 'tisane,' and it would be my duty to shake out of the chemist's little package on to a plate the amount of lime-blossom required for infusion in boiling water.
Marcel Proust
#43. What criterion ought one to adopt to judge one's fellows? After all, there was not a single person he knew who might not, in certain circumstances, prove capable of a shameful action.
Marcel Proust
#44. It's far more difficult to disfigure a great work of art than to create one.
Marcel Proust
#45. 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
#46. So long as I know what's boiling in my pot I don't bother my head about what's in other people's.
Marcel Proust
#47. How often is not the prospect of future happiness thus sacrificed to one's impatient insistence upon an immediate gratification.
Marcel Proust
#48. Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps, old snuff-boxes, or even to paintings and statues.
Marcel Proust
#49. For regret, like desire, seeks not to analyse but to gratify itself. When one begins to love, one spends one's time, not in getting to know what one's love really is, but in arranging for tomorrow's rendezvous.
Marcel Proust
#50. Do you think it possible for a woman really to be touched by a man's being in love with her, and never to be unfaithful to him?
Marcel Proust
#51. Anyone who's read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles.
Lorrie Moore
#52. In later years, one can grow so well accustomed as to smile at them, to take the tormentor's side with a. happy determination which deludes one into the belief that it is not, really, tormenting; but
Marcel Proust
#53. There is nothing like desire for obstructing any resemblance between what one says and what one has on one's mind.
Marcel Proust
#54. Swann, with that almost arrogant charity of a man of the world who, amid the dissolution of all his own moral prejudices, finds in another's shame merely a reason for treating him with a friendly benevolence ...
Marcel Proust
#55. The courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the 'other side' ...
Marcel Proust
#56. In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it ... a wild book.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
#57. But one never finds a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer's leap in the air quite as high as one has been expecting;
Marcel Proust
#58. Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island.
Lawrence Block
#59. "It smells all right; it makes your head go round; it catches your breath; you feel ticklish all over - and not the faintest clue how it's done. The man's a sorcerer; the thing's a conjuring trick, it's a miracle," ...
Marcel Proust
#60. Until I saw Chardin's painting, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.
Marcel Proust
#61. A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.
Marcel Proust
#62. I spent most of this weekend sitting on the sofa reading Proust. The only time my mother left her studio, which she locked behind her, was to go to Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt's house.
Rachel Klein
#63. as those old engravings of the 'Cenacolo,' or that painting by Gentile Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in which they no longer exist, the masterpiece of Leonardo and the portico of Saint Mark's. We
Marcel Proust
#64. It is the tragedy of other people that they are merely showcases for the very perishable collections of one's own mind.
Marcel Proust
#65. All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.
Marcel Proust
#66. A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.
Marcel Proust
#67. When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman, one ought to say to oneself, "What are her surroundings? What has been her life? All one's future happiness lies in the answer.
Marcel Proust
#68. Her [Gilberte's] face, grown almost ugly, reminded me then of those dreary beaches where the sea, ebbing far out, wearies one with its faint shimmering, everywhere the same, encircled by an immutable low horizon.
Marcel Proust
#69. You can't learn the truth about a man's intentions by asking him.
Marcel Proust
#70. Like a fruit hidden among its leaves, which has grown and ripened unobserved by man, until it falls of its own accord, there came upon us one night the kitchen-maid's confinement.
Marcel Proust
#71. Reading Proust isn't just reading a book, it's an experience and you can't reject an experience.
William Gaddis
#72. There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.
Marcel Proust
#73. How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory.
Marcel Proust
#74. There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.
Marcel Proust
#76. In most women's lives, everything, even the greatest sorrow, comes down to a question of 'I haven't got a thing to wear'.
Marcel Proust
#77. Like a blood-red sky that warns the passerby, "There is a fire over there," certain blazing looks often reveal passions that they serve merely to reflect. They are flames in the mirror.
Marcel Proust
#78. Truth and life are very difficult to fathom, and I retained of them, without really having got to know them, an impression in which sadness was perhaps actually eclipsed by exhaustion.
Marcel Proust
#79. She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.
Marcel Proust
#80. No doubt my books too, like my mortal being, would eventually die, one day. But one has to resign oneself to dying. One accepts the thought that in ten years oneself, in a hundred years one's books, will not exist. Eternal duration is no more promised to books than it is to men.
Marcel Proust
#81. 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
#82. Moreover, each man's malevolence quite involuntarily exaggerated the other's importance, as if the chief of villains were confronting the king of imbeciles.
Marcel Proust
#83. From the pavement, I could see the window of Albertine's room, that window, formerly quite black, at night, when she was not staying in the house, which the electric light inside, dissected by the slats of the shutters, striped from top to bottom with parallel bars of gold.
Marcel Proust
#84. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom.
Virginia Woolf
#85. One felt that in her renunciation of life she had deliberately abandoned those places in which she might at least have been able to see the man she loved, for others where he had never trod.
Marcel Proust
#86. To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!
Marcel Proust
#87. People who learn some correct detail about another person's life at once draw conclusions from it which are not accurate, and see in the newly discovered fact an explanation of things that have no connexion with it whatsoever.
Marcel Proust
#88. She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That's the only way to get really good ones. And they're the rarest of luxuries.
Marcel Proust
#89. The young woman's smiling lips met his caresses halfway, and her eyes shone in their depths like pools warmed by the sun.
Marcel Proust
#90. In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.
Marcel Proust
#92. Her [Albertine's] intense and velvety gaze fastened itself, glued itself to the passer-by, so adhesive, so corrosive, that you felt that, in withdrawing, it must tear away the skin.
Marcel Proust
#93. 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
#94. Alexis was now accustomed to his uncle's fatal disease as we are to all things that last around us; and because he had once made his nephew cry as the dead make us cry, the boy, even though his uncle was still alive, treated him like a dead man: he had begun to forget him.
Marcel Proust
#95. A fashionable milieu is one in which each person's opinion is made up of everyone else's opinions. Does each opinion run counter to everyone else's? Then it is a literary milieu.
Marcel Proust
#96. There's nothing like taking Proust to the beach and daydreaming along to it.
Jerry Hall
#97. as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter's absence.
Marcel Proust
#98. All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.
Allan Bloom
#99. That's it then. This is how it ends. I haven't even read Proust.
James Turner
#100. Those who have played a big part in one's life very rarely disappear from it suddenly for good. They return to it at odd moments ... before leaving it for good.
Marcel Proust
