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I waited alone, in the company of orchids, roses and violets who—like people waiting beside you, but to whom you are unknown—maintained a silence which their individuality of living things rendered more imposing and in their chilly manner received the heat from an incandescent coal fire, preciously placed behind a crystal glass, in a white marble tub where it dropped, from time to time, its dangerous rubies.
(Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French novelist. Nouvelle Revue Française (1918). Remembrance of Things Past, vol. II, Within a Budding Grove, p. 527, Pléiade (1954).)
Read more quotations about / on: silence, time, fire, alone, people
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The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.
(Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French novelist. Nouvelle Revue Française (1918). Remembrance of Things Past, vol. II, Within a Budding Grove, p. 612, Pléiade (1954).)
Read more quotations about / on: time
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3
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I knew very well that this hope was chimerical. I was like a pauper who mingles fewer tears with his dry bread if he tells himself that at any moment a stranger will bequeath to him his fortune. We must all, in order to make reality more tolerable, keep alive in us a few little follies.
(Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French novelist. Nouvelle Revue Française (1918). Remembrance of Things Past, vol. II, Within a Budding Grove, p. 591, Pléiade (1954).
Marcel hopes to love Gilberte again.)
Read more quotations about / on: hope
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It seems that certain transcendental realities emit rays to which the masses are sensitive. That is how, for example, when an event takes place, when at the front an army is in danger, or defeated, or victorious, the rather obscure news which the cultivated man does not quite understand, excite in the masses an emotion which surprises him and in which, once the experts have informed him of the actual military situation, he recognizes the populace's perception of that "aura" surrounding great events and visible for hundreds of kilometers.
(Marcel Proust 187101922, French novelist. Nouvelle Revue Française (1918). Remembrance of Things Past, vol. II, Within a Budding Grove, p. 450, Pléiade (1954).)
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5
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Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.
(Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French novelist. Nouvelle Revue Française (1918). Bergotte in Remembrance of Things Past, vol. II, Within a Budding Grove, p. 570, Pléiade (1954).)
Read more quotations about / on: people
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Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.
(Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French novelist. "Time Regained," vol. 12, ch. 3, Remembrance of Things Past (1927), trans. by Stephen Hudson (1931).)
Read more quotations about / on: happiness
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But, when nothing subsists from a distant past, after the death of others, after the destruction of objects, only the senses of smell and taste, weaker but more enduring, more intangible, more persistent, more faithful, continue for a long time, like souls, to remember, to wait, to hope, on the ruins of all the rest, to bring without flinching, on their nearly impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.
(Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French novelist. Nouvelle Revue Française (1913). Remembrance of Things Past, vol. I, Swann's Way, p. 47, Pléiade (1954).)
Read more quotations about / on: memory, remember, hope, death, time
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