01c. 1896 ADWe forgive the crimes of individuals, but not their participation in a collective crime.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
02c. 1896 AD... the burrowing wasp, which in order to provide a supply of fresh meat for her offspring after her own decease, calls in the science of anatomy to amplify the resources of her instinctive cruelty, and, having made a collection of weevils and spiders, proceeds with marvellous knowledge and skill to pierce the nerve-centre on which their power of locomotion (but none of their other vital functions) depends, so that the paralysed insect, beside which her egg is laid, will furnish the larva, when it is hatched, with a tamed and inoffensive quarry, incapable either of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh for the larder...Marcel Proust / quote ↗
04c. 1896 AD... the kiss, the bodily surrender which would seem natural and but moderately attractive...Marcel Proust / quote ↗
05c. 1896 ADAh, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
06c. 1896 ADIt is the same in life; the heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune; but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.Lygiai taip gyvenime keičiasi ir mūsų širdis, ir tai skaudžiausia; tačiau patiriame tą skausmą tik skaitydami knygas, vaizduotėje; tikrovėje jos keitimasis, kaip ir kai kurių gamtos reiškinių vyksmas yra toks lėtas, kad nors ir galime konstatuoti kiekvieną atskirą būseną, paties keitimosi pajusti nepajėgiame.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
07c. 1896 ADWe do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
08c. 1896 ADI spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was watching her sleep.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
09c. 1896 ADSometimes, 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.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
10c. 1896 AD... even in his most artificial creations, nature is the material upon which man has to work; certain spots will persist in remaining surrounded by the vassals of their own special sovereignty, and will raise their immemorial standards among all the 'laid-out' scenery of a park, just as they would have done far from any human interference, in a solitude which must everywhere return to engulf them, springing up out of the necessities of their exposed position, and superimposing itself upon the work of man's hands.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
12c. 1896 ADFor, like desire, regret seeks not to be analysed but to be satisfied. When one begins to love, one spends one’s time, not in getting to know what one’s love really is, but in making it possible to meet next day. When one abandons love one seeks not to know one’s grief but to offer to her who is causing it that expression of it which seems to one the most moving. One says the things which one feels the need of saying, and which the other will not understand, one speaks for oneself alone. I wrote: 'I had thought that it would not be possible. Alas, I see now that it is not so difficult.' I said also: 'I shall probably not see you again;' I said it while I continued to avoid shewing a coldness which she might think affected, and the words, as I wrote them, made me weep because I felt that they expressed not what I should have liked to believe but what was probably going to happen.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
13c. 1896 ADThe beauty of images lies behind things, the beauty of ideas in front of them.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
15c. 1896 AD...for each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
16c. 1896 AD... I should have been struck down by the despair a young lover feels who has sworn lifelong fidelity, when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to come.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
17c. 1896 ADEven his mother, his own mother, had once accused him of being a snob.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
18c. 1896 ADI walked past her, thinking: Is this what happens to the youth of women? Those whom we have met in the past, if suddenly we desire to see them again, have they become old? Is the young woman whom we desire like a character on the stage, when, unable to secure the actress who created the part, the management is obliged to entrust it to a new star? But then it is no longer the same.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
19c. 1896 ADOccasionally I looked up towards some vast old apartment with its shutters still open and where amphibious men and women, adapting themselves each evening to living in an element different from their daytime one, swam about slowly in the dense liquid which at nightfall rises incessantly from the wells of lamps and fills the rooms to the brink of their walls of stone and glass, and as they moved about in it, their bodies sent forth unctuous golden ripples.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
20c. 1896 ADA real person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
21c. 1896 ADAn excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
22c. 1896 ADA 'sadist' of her kind is an artist in evil, which a wholly wicked person could not be...Marcel Proust / quote ↗
23c. 1896 ADEven when she had to make some one a present of the kind called 'useful,' when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking-stick, she would choose 'antiques,' as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
24c. 1896 ADI never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
