01c. 1896 AD... the cattleyas especially (these being, with chrysanthemums, her favourite flowers), because they had the supreme merit of not looking in the least like other flowers, but of being made, apparently, out of scraps of silk or satin.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
02c. 1896 ADGardeners produce flowers that are delicious dreams, and others too that are like nightmares.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
03c. 1896 ADAnd what little she allowed herself to say was said in a strained tone, in which her ingrained timidity paralysed her tendency to freedom and audacity of speech.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
04c. 1896 ADWhen he spoke, his words came with a confusion which was delightful to hear because one felt that it indicated not so much a defect in his speech as a quality of his soul, as it were a survival from the age of innocence which he had never wholly outgrown.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
05c. 1896 ADA book is like a large cemetery upon whose tombs one can no longer read the effaced names. On the other hand, sometimes one remembers well the name, without knowing if anything of the being, whose name it was, survives in these pages.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
06c. 1896 ADProsperity of wicked men runs like a torrent past, and soon is spent.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
07c. 1896 ADEven from the point of view of coquetry, pure and simple," he had told her, "can't you see how much of your attraction you throw away when you stoop to lying?Marcel Proust / quote ↗
08c. 1896 ADWas the happiness of knowing these girls really unattainable? It would certainly not have been the first happiness of that sort which I had abandoned all hope of ever enjoying?Marcel Proust / quote ↗
09c. 1896 ADIt was not that Madame Santeuil's moral values had altered, but only her view of the moral values of others.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
10c. 1896 AD... the serpent hissing between the lips of Envy is so huge, and so completely fills her wide-opened mouth that the muscles of her face are strained and contorted,...Marcel Proust / quote ↗
11c. 1896 ADWhenever she saw in others an advantage, however trivial, which she herself lacked, she would persuade herself that it was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity so as not to have to envy them.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
12c. 1896 AD... the reigns of the kings and queens who are portrayed as kneeling with clasped hands in the windows of churches, were stained by oppression and bloodshed.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
13c. 1896 ADDinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
14c. 1896 ADThe fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
15c. 1896 ADA person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
16c. 1896 ADSoon, what was tedious was everything. 'Beautiful things, they're so tedious! Paintings, they're enough to drive you mad...How right you are, it's so tedious, writing letters!' In the end it was life itself that she declared to us was a bore, without one quite knowing from where she was taking her term of comparison.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
17c. 1896 ADThe fault I find in our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other everyday, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
18c. 1896 ADHe was one of that class of men who, apart from a scientific career in which they may well have proved brilliantly successful, have acquired an entirely different kind of culture, literary or artistic, for which their professional specialisation has no use but by which their conversation profits.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
19c. 1896 ADPerhaps she would not have thought of wickedness as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was so refreshing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself, as in all her fellow-men and women, that indifference to the sufferings which they cause which, whatever names else be given it, is the one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
20c. 1896 ADEverything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them nor all they have suffered to enrich us.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
21c. 1896 ADUntil I saw Chardin's painting I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house in the half-cleared table in the corner of a tablecloth left awry in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
22c. 1896 ADThere are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them: those we spent with a favourite book.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
23c. 1896 ADWe do not succeed in changing things according to our desire but gradually our desire changes.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
24c. 1896 ADAll our final resolutions are made in a state of mind which is not going to last.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
