Marcel Proust

“A picture’s beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.”

“By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after another, the different human personalities with which we had deceived me ever since the day when I had first made her acquaintance. She was animated now only by the unconscious life of plants, of trees, a life more different from my own, more alien, and yet one that belonged more to me. Her psonality was not constantly escaping, as when we talked, by the outlets of her unacknowledged thoughts and of her eyes. She had called back into herself everything of her that lay outside, had withdrawn, enclosed, reabsorbed herself into her body. In keeping her in front of my eyes, in my hands, I had an impression of possessing her entirely which I never had when she was awake. Her life was submitted to me, exhaled towards me its gentle breath.I listened to this murmuring, mysterious emanation, soft as a sea breeze, magical as a gleam of moonlight, that was her sleep. So long as it lasted, I was free to dream about her and yet at the same time to look at her, and when that sleep grew deeper, to touch, to kiss her. What I felt then was a love as pure, as immaterial, as mysterious, as if I had been in the presence of those inanimate creatures which are the beauties of nature. And indeed, as soon as her sleep became at all deep, she ceased to be merely the plant that she had been; her sleep,on the margin of which I remained musing, with a fresh delight of which I never tired, which I could have gone on enjoying indefinitely, was to me a whole lanscape. Her sleep brought within my reach something as serene, as sensually delicious as those nights of full moon on the bay of Balbec, calm as a lake over which the branches barely stir, where, stretched out upon the stand, one could listen for hours on end to the surf breaking and receding.On entering the room, I would remain standing in the doorway, not venturing to make a sound, and hearing none but that of her breath rising to expire upon her lips at regular intervals, like the reflux of the sea, but drowsier and softer. And at the moment when my ear absorbed that divine sound, I felt that there was condensed in it the whole person, the whole life of the charming captive outstretched there before my eyes. Carriages went rattling past in the street, but her brow remained as smooth and untroubled, her breath as light, reduced to the simple expulsion of the necessary quantity of air. Then, seeing that her sleep would not be disturbed, I would advance cautiously, sit down on the chair that stood by the bedside, then on the bed itself.”

“We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.”

“A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.”

“I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up.”

“Quando Odette deixasse de ser para ele uma criatura sempre ausente, cobiçada, imaginária, quando o sentimento que ele tinha por ela não fosse mais aquela mesma perturbação misteriosa que lhe causava a frase da sonata e sim afeto, reconhecimento, quando se estabelecessem entre ambos relações normais que poriam fim à loucura e à tristeza dele, então sem dúvida os atos da vida de Odette lhe pareceriam si mesmos pouco interessantes.”

“El deseo nos fuerza a amar lo que nos hará sufrir.”

“Embora Swann nunca se tivesse considerado seriamente ameaçado pela amizade de Odette por esse ou aquele fiel, sentira uma profunda doçura ao ouvi-la admitir assim diante de todos, com aquele tranquilo despudor, seus encontros cotidianos de cada noite, a situação privilegiada que ele ocupava em sua casa e a preferência por ele que ali estava implícita.”

“To understand a profound thought is to have, at the moment one understands it, a profound thought oneself; and this demands some effort, a genuine descent to the heart of oneself . . . Only desire and love give us the strength to make this effort. The only books that we truly absorb are those we read with real appetite, after having worked hard to get them, so great had been our need of them.”

“We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.”

“Ele só teve um momento de frieza, com o Dr. Cottard: vendo-o piscar o olho e sorrir-lhe com um ar ambíguo antes que se tivessem falado (mímica que Cottard chamava de "deixar fluir"), Swann acreditou que o médico o conheci sem dúvida por ter estado com ele em algum lugar de prazer, embora ele mesmo os frequentasse muito pouco, nunca tendo vivido no mundo da farra. Considerando a alusão de mau gosto, sobretudo na presença de Odette, que poderia fazer dele uma ideia falsa, simulou um ar glacial. Mas quando soube que a dama que se encontrava a seu lado era a sra. Cottard, pensou que um marido tão jovem não teria pensado em fazer alusão, diante de sua mulher, a divertimento desse tipo, e deixou de atribuir ao ar cúmplice do médico o significado que temia.”

“Ogni lettore, quando legge, legge sé stesso. L'opera dello scrittore è soltanto una specie di strumento ottico che è offerto al lettore per permettergli di discernere quello che, senza libro, non avrebbe forse visto in sé stesso.”

“[My grandmother] was so humble of heart and so gentle that her tenderness for others and her disregard for herself and her own troubles blended in a smile which, unlike those seen on the majority of human faces, bore no trace of irony save for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes, which could not look upon those she loved without seeming to bestow upon them passionate caresses.”

“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.”

“It is the wicked deception of love that it begins by making us dwell not upon a woman in the outside world but upon a doll inside our head, the only woman who is always available in fact, the only one we shall ever possess, whom the arbitrary nature of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the real Balbec had been from the Balbec I imagined- a dummy creation that little by little, to our own detriment, we shall force the real woman to resemble.”

“An hour is not merely an hour; it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.”

“When he talked, there was a sort of mushy sound to his pronunciation that was charming because one sensed that it betrayed not so much an impediment in his speech as a quality of his soul, a sort of vestige of early childhood innocence that he had never lost. Each consonant he could not pronounce appeared to be another instance of a hardness of which he was incapable.”

“A certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our heart.”

“The oddities of charming people exasperate us, but there are few if any charming people who are not, at the same time, odd.”

“The intellectual distinction of a house and its smartness are generally in inverse rather than direct ratio.”

“Happiness is good for the body, but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.”

“The person with whom we are in love is to be recognised only by the intensity of the pain that we suffer.”

“A person does not, as I had imagined, stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourselves (like a garden at which we gaze through a railing with all its borders spread out before us), but is a shadow which we can never penetrate, of which there can be no such thing as direct knowledge, with respect to which we form countless beliefs, based upon words and sometimes actions, neither of which can give us anything but inadequate and as it proves contradictory information — a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.”

“A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.”

“...and he would have also to endure his book like a form of fatigue, to accept it like a discipline, build it up like a church, follow it like a medical regime, vanquish it like an obstacle, win it like a friendship, cosset it like a little child, create it like a new world without neglecting those mysteries whose explanation is to be found probably only in worlds other than our own and the presentiment of which is the thing that moves us most deeply in life and in art.”

“In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.”

“And it is, after all, as good a way as any of solving the problem of existence to get near enough to the things and people that have appeared to us beautiful and mysterious from a distance to be able to satisfy ourselves that they have neither mystery nor beauty.”

“Kao god što se pametan čovek neće plašiti da će ispasti glup u očima drugog pametnog čoveka, tako se i otmen čovek plaši da će njegova otmenost promaći ne nekom velikom gospodinu, nego prostaku.Tri četvrtine napora da se bude duhovit i tri četvrtine sujetnih laži koje su, otkako je sveta, prosuli ljudi koje je to samo unižavalo, sve je to bilo radi nižih od njih.”

“Words present us with little pictures, clear and familiar, like those that are hung on the walls of schools to give children an example of what a workbench is, a bird, an anthill, things conceived of as similar to all others of the same sort. But names present a confused image of people--and of towns, which they accustom us to believe are individual, unique like people--an image which derives from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the color with which it is painted uniformly, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, because of the limitations of the process used or by a whim of the designer, not only the sky and the sea are blue or red, but the boats, the church, the people in the streets.”

“(...) telefon znajdował się w moim pokoju, aby zaś nie przeszkdzał rodzicom, dzownej zastąpiony był głuchym terczeniem.Z obawy, że go nie usłyszę, nie ruszałem się. Nieruchomość moja była taka, że pierwszy raz od wielu miesięcy zauważyłem tykanie zegara. Franciszka przyszła sprzątnąć. Rozmawiała ze mną, ale ja nie znosiłem tej rozmowy, pod której jednostajnie banalną ciągłością uczucia moje zmieniały się co chwila, przechodząc od obawy do lęku, od lęku do zupełnego zwątpienia. Twarz moja, różna od zdawkowo pogodnych słów, jakimi uważałem za właściwe odpowiadać Franciszce, była - czułem to - tak zbolała, żem się zacząć skarżyć na reumatyzm, aby wytłumaczyć rozdźwięk między udaną obojętnością a tym bolesnym wyrazem. Zarazem bałem się, aby rzucane, zresztą półgłosem, słowa Franciszki (nie na temat Albertyny, bo Franciszka sądziła, że już dawno minęła godzina jej możliwego przyjścia) nie przeszkodziły mi dosłyszeć zbawczego i niepowrotnego sygnału. W końcu Franciszka poszła się położyć; odprawiłem ją z szorstką dobrodusznością, aby, odchodząc, hałasem nie pokryła dźwięku telefonu. I zacząłem na nowo słuchać, cierpieć. Kiedy czekamy, podwója droga od ucha, chwytającego dźwięki, do mózgu, który je rozbiera i analizuje, i od mózgu do serca, któremu mózg przekazuje swoje wyniki, jest tak szybka, że nie możemy nawet pochwycić jej trwania i że się nam wydaje, iż słuchaliśmy wprost sercem.Dręczyło mnie nieustanne pragnienie, wciąż niespokojniejsze i wciąż nie spełnione - pragnienie sygnału telefonicznego.Kiedy doszło szczytowego punktu bolesnego wznoszenia się w spiralach mojej samotnej udręki, naraz, z głębi ludnego i nocnego Paryża, zbliżonego nagle do mnie, tuż koło szafy z książkami usłyszałem - mechaniczne i wzniosłe, niby w "Tristanie: powiewająca szarfa lub fujarka pasterza - terczenie telefonu. Podskoczyłem: to była Albertyna.”

“Je moi-même semblait en fait à avoir devenir la sujet de ma livre: un église, un quatuor, et la amitié entre François I and Charles V.”

“This new concept of the "finest, highest achievement of art" had no sooner entered my mind than it located the imperfect enjoyment I had had at the theater, and added to it a little of what it lacked; this made such a heady mixture that I exclaimed, "What a great artiste she is!" It may be thought I was not altogether sincere. Think, however, of so many writers who, in a moment of dissatisfaction with a piece they have just written, may read a eulogy of the genius of Chateaubriand, or who may think of some other great artist whom they have dreamed of equaling, who hum to themselves a phrase of Beethoven for instance, comparing the sadness of it to the mood they have tried to capture in their prose, and are then so carried away by the perception of genius that they let it affect the way they read their own piece, no longer seeing it as they first saw it, but going so far as to hazard an act of faith in the value of it, by telling themselves "It's not bad you know!" without realizing that the sum total which determines their ultimate satisfaction includes the memory of Chateaubriand's brilliant pages, which they have assimilated to their own, but which, of course, they did not write. Think of all the men who go on believing in the love of a mistress in whom nothing is more flagrant than her infidelities; of all those torn between the hope of something beyond this life (such as the bereft widower who remembers a beloved wife, or the artist who indulges in dreams of posthumous fame, each of them looking forward to an afterlife which he knows is inconceivable) and the desire for a reassuring oblivion, when their better judgement reminds them of the faults they might otherwise have to expiate after death; or think of the travelers who are uplifted by the general beauty of a journey they have just completed, although during it their main impression, day after day, was that it was a chore--think of them before deciding whether, given the promiscuity of the ideas that lurk within us, a single one of those that affords us our greatest happiness has not begun life by parasitically attaching itself to a foreign idea with which it happened to come into contact, and by drawing from it much of the power of pleasing which it once lacked.”

“Suddenly the memory of his wife came back to him and, no doubt feeling it would be too complicated to try to understand how he could have yielded to an impulse of happiness at such a time, he confined himself, in a habitual gesture of his whenever a difficult question came to his mind, to passing his hand over his forehead, wiping his eyes and the lenses of his lorgnon. Yet he could not be consoled for the death of his wife, but, during the two years he survived her, would say to my grandfather: “It’s odd, I think of my poor wife often, but I can’t think of her for a long time.”

“This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever and new ones have formed that have given birth to new sorrows and joys which I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones have been difficult for me to understand. It was a very long time ago, too, that my father ceased to be able to say to Mama, “Go with the boy.” The possibility of such hours will never be reborn for me.”

“But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others.”

“The names of Northern railway stations in a timetable where he would like to imagine himself stepping from the train on an autumn evening when the trees are already bare and smelling strongly in the keen air, an insipid publication for people of taste, full of names that he has not heard since childhood, may have far greater value for him than five volumes of philosophy, and lead people of taste to say that for a man of talent, he has very stupid tastes.”

“Art is not alone in imparting charm and mystery to the most insignificant things; pain is endowed with the same power to bring them into intimate relation with ourselves.”

“But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, on the ruin of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.”

“I was so much in the habit of having Albertine with me, and now I suddenly saw a new aspect of Habit. Hitherto I had regarded it chiefly as an annihilating force which suppresses the originality and even the awareness of one's perceptions; now I saw it as a dread deity, so riveted to one's being, its insignificant face so incrusted in one's heart, that if it detaches itself, if it turns away from one, this deity that one had barely distinguished inflicts on one sufferings more terrible than any other and is then as cruel as death itself.”

“The truth I am seeking is not in the drink, but in me”

“Sometimes, as Eve was born from one of Adam’s ribs, a woman was born during my sleep from a cramped position of my thigh. Formed from the pleasure I was on the point of enjoying, she, I imagined, was the one offering it to me. My body, which felt in hers my own warmth, would try to find itself inside her, I would wake up. The rest of humanity seemed very remote compared to this woman I had left scarcely a few moments before; my cheek was still warm from her kiss, my body aching from the weight of hers. If, as sometimes happens, she had the features of a woman I had known in life, I would devote myself entirely to this end: to finding her again, like those who go off on a journey to see a longed-for city with their own eyes and imagine that one can enjoy in reality the charm of a dream. Little by little, the memory of her would fade, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.”

“Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one's eyes, of the various events of one's life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables ones to resuscitate dead recollections, but even then, there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain for ever unverifiable.”

“Le risoluzioni definitive si prendono sempre e soltanto per uno stato d'animo che non è destinato a durare.”

“And even before my brain, lingering in consideration of when things had happened and of what they had looked like, had sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, it, my body, would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had found there when I awoke.”

“But should a sensation from the distant past-like those musical instruments that record and preserve the sound and style of the various artists who played them-enable our memory to make us hear that name with the particular tone it then had for our ears, even if the name seems not to have changed, we can still feel the distance between the various dreams which its unchanging syllables evoked for us in turn. For a second, rehearing the warbling from some distant springtime, we can extract from it, as from the little tubes of color used in painting, the precise tint-forgotten, mysterious, and fresh-of the days we thought we remembered when, like bad painters, we were in fact spreading our whole past on a single canvas and painting it with the conventional monochrome of voluntary memory.”

“I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been - if the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not intervened - the means of communication between souls.”

“For in this worldof ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind, still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely, grief.”

“It was with an unusual intensity of pleasure, a pleasure destined to have a lasting effect on him, that Swann remarked Odette's resemblance to the Zipporah of that Alessandro de Mariano to whom more people willingly give his popular surname, Botticelli, now that it suggests not so much the actual work of the Master as that false and banal conception of it which has of late obtained common currency.”

“Aquella alcoba chiquita, tan alta de techo, que se alzaba en forma de pirámide, ocupando la altura de dos pisos, revestida en parte de caoba y en donde me sentí desde el primer momento moralmente envenenado por el olor nuevo, desconocido para mí, de la petiveria, y convencido de la hostilidad de las cortinas moradas y de la insolente indiferencia del reloj de péndulo, que se pasaba las horas chirriando, como si allí no hubiera nadie; cuarto en donde un extraño e implacable espejo, sostenido en cuadradas patas, se atravesaba oblicuamente en uno de los rincones de la habitación, abriéndose a la fuerza en la dulce plenitud de mi campo visual acostumbrado, un lugar que no estaba previsto y en donde mi pensamiento sufrió noches muy crueles afanándose durante horas y horas por dislocarse, por estirarse hacia lo alto para poder tomar cabalmente la forma de la habitación y llenar hasta arriba su gigantesco embudo, mientras yo estaba echado en mi cama, con los ojos mirando al techo, el oído avizor, las narices secas y el corazón palpitante; hasta que la costumbre cambió el color de las cortinas, enseñó al reloj a ser silencioso y al espejo, sesgado y cruel, a ser compasivo; disimuló, ya que no llegara a borrarlo por completo, el olor de la petiveria, e introdujo notable disminución en la altura aparente del techo.”

“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.”