1,085 Quotes by Marcel Proust

So that every fresh encounter is a sort of rectification, which brings us back to what we really did see. We have no longer any recollection of this, to such an extent does what we call remembering a person consist really in forgetting him.

As a surgical patient, by means of a local anaesthetic, can look on with a clear consciousness while an operation is being performed upon him and yet feel nothing, I could repeat to myself some favourite lines, or watch my grandfather attempting to talk to Swann about the Duc d’Audriffet-Pasquier, without being able to kindle any emotion from one or amusement from the other.

For a man cannot change, that is to say become another person, while he continues to obey the dictates of the self which he has ceased to be.

How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory.

I felt even disappointed when he resumed the thread of his narrative.

That girl whom I never saw save dappled with the shadows of their leaves, was to me herself a plant of local growth, only taller than the rest, and one whose structure would enable me to approach more closely than in them to the intimate savour of the land from which she had sprung.

The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it...

People claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

All the great writers are like that: the beauty of their sentences, like the beauty of a woman one has not yet met, is unforeseeable...