1,085 Quotes by Marcel Proust

Not caring for their lives, is it? Why, what in the world should we care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time? Alas, dear God! You're right all the same, they don't care! I can remember them in '70, in those wretched wars, they've no fear of death left in them(...)they're not men anymore, they're lions.

His nature was really like a sheet of paper that has been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten it out.

O lovitură scurtă în fereastră, ca și cum ceva ar fi izbit-o, urmată de o amplă cădere abia simțită, de parcă o mînă de fire de nisip s-ar fi prăbușit de la fereastra de deasupra, apoi mișcarea extinzîndu-se, regularizîndu-se, adoptînd un ritm, devenind fluidă, sonoră, muzicală, atotcuprinzătoare, universală: începea să plouă.

An hour or so later he received a note from Odette. Swann had left his cigarette case at her house. "If only," she wrote, "you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have it back.

Die Erinnerung an ein bestimmtes Bild ist wehmutsvolles Gedenken an einen bestimmten Augenblick; und Häuser, Straßen, Avenuen sind flüchtig, ach! Wie die Jahre.

Anything we have not had to decipher, to bring to light by our own effort, anything which was already clearly visible, is not our own.

And so it is with things that we shall later love the most. We meet them first as strangers who give us only a feeling of surprise.

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!

Victor Hugo, şöyle der: Çimenler uzamalı, çocuklar ölmeli mutlaka. Ben diyorum ki, sanatın acımasız yasası uyarınca, insanların, kendimizin, ıstırabın her türünü tattıktan sonra ölmesi gerekir ki, unutuşun değil, ebedî hayatın çimleri, verimli eserlerin gür otları uzasın, gelecek nesiller neşe içinde, altında uyuyanlara aldırmadan gelip "kırda yemek"lerini yiyebilsinler.