1,085 Quotes by Marcel Proust

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.

There is a beauty in being surrounded by the foreign – seeing things from a new perspective, with new eyes

He imagined himself lying there, unable to sleep, thinking of his mother, separated from her by the unresponsive blankets tucked too tightly round him, feeling the ceaseless thumping of his heart in the silence of the night, the irrevocability of absence, the rigid stillness of repose, the agony of solitude and sleeplessness. If the room was a prison, the bed was a tomb.

Nasıl ki bazı yaratıklar, tabiatın üretmekten vazgeçtiği bir canlı türünün son örnekleriyse, acaba –dil, kelimeler, düşüncelerin çözümlenmesi icat edilmemiş olsa–ruhlar arasında mevcut olabilecek iletişimin yegâne örneği de müzik mi diye düşünüyordum. Müzik, devamı gelmemiş bir olasılık gibidir; insanlık başka yollara, konuşma ve yazı diline sapmıştır.

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.

In the case of the solitary, his seclusion, even when it is absolute and ends only with life itself, has often as its primary cause a disordered love of the crowd, which so far overruled every other feeling that, not being able to win, when he goes out, the admiration of his hall-porter, of the passers-by, of the cabman whom he hails, he prefers not to be seen by them at all, and with that object abandons every activity that would oblige him to go out of doors.

A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.

The end of a book’s wisdom appears to us as merely the start of our own, so that at the moment when the book has told us everything it can, it gives rise to the feeling that it has told us nothing.

Reading is at the threshold of our inner life; it can lead us into that life but cannot constitute it.