Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proustwas a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu, published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by many to be one of the greatest authors...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 July 1871
CountryFrance
life thinking two
We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.
sight mind littles
The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it....
truth familiar truest
The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
doctors half fool
A doctor who doesn't say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured.
faces study appearance
And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.
dream song dust
A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dreams that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.
ideas opposites doe
There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.
abnormal states
In love, happiness is an abnormal state.
illness
Death is in truth an illness from which we recover
writing yawning want
Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.
octopus our-words body
But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.
tasks duty interpreter
The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.
oysters knives parent
Until 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.
yesterday giving house
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.