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Famous Marcel Proust Quotes

“It was not only Odette's indifference, however, that he must take pains to circumvent; it was also, not infrequently, his own; feeling that, since Odette had had every facility for seeing him, she seemed no longer to have very much to say to him when they did meet, he was afraid lest the manner - at once trivial, monotonous, and seemingly unalterable - which she now adopted when they were together should ultimately destroy in him that romantic hope, that a day might come when she would make avowal of her passion, by which hope alone he had become and would remain her lover.”

LoveIndifferenceLover
Book:Swann’s Way
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“زنی که این اندازه رنجش می‌داد نه تنها کمتر که برعکس، هرچه بیشتر برایش عزیز می‌شد، انگار که همراه با هرچه بالاتر گرفتن درد، ارزش نوشدارو، ارزش داروی آرام‌بخشی هم که تنها در دست اودت بود فزونی می‌یافت. سوان می‌خواست بیشتر تیمارش کند، آن گونه که برای بیماری‌ای که ناگهان دریابی از آنچه بوده وخیم‌تر است.”

LoveRomanceRelationshipsHeartbreakEmotionsعشقرابطهجداییاحساساتشکست
Book:Swann’s Way
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“اگر هم بتوانیم آرزو کنیم کارهای کسی که تاکنون رنجمان داده است از تهِ دل نبوده باشد، [...] باید بپرسیم که کردار فردای آن کس چه خواهد بود؟ این گفته‌های تازه به گوش عشق من می‌رسید؛ به او می‌باورانید که فردا فرقی با روزهای گذشته نخواهد داشت و احساس ژیلبرت به من کهنه‌تر از آن است که تغییر کند، احساس بی‌اعتنایی است، و در دوستی من و ژیلبرت تنها منم که عشق می‌ورزم! و عشقم در پاسخ می‌گفت: «درست است، دیگر با این دوستی هیچ کاری نمی‌شود کرد، دگرگون نخواهد شد.»”

LoveRomanceRelationshipsHeartbreakEmotionsعشقرابطهجداییاحساساتشکست
Book:Swann’s Way
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“آن شب مادام دلوم به شوهرش گفت: «طفلک سوان ... فکر می‌کنم مسخره باشد که مردی به این فهمیدگی برای همچو زنی رنج بکشد که حتی زن جالبی هم نیست، چون می‌گویند خیلی احمق است.» این را با خردمندی آدم‌های عاشق نشده گفت که معتقدند یک مرد فهمیده باید تنها به خاطر کسی غصه بخورد که لیاقتش را داشته باشد؛ و این کمابیش به آن می‌ماند که کسی تعجب کند چرا آدم به خاطر چیزی به کوچکی یک باسیل ناقابل دچار وبا می‌شود!”

LoveRomanceRelationshipsHeartbreakEmotionsعشقرابطهجداییاحساساتشکست
Book:Swan's Way
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“[سوان] به خود می‌گفت: «واقعا پیشرفت محسوس است؛ خوب که به قضیه دقیق می‌شوم، می‌بینم که دیروز از بودن با او تقریبا هیچ لذت نمی‌بردم: عجیب است که حتی به نظرم زشت می‌رسید.» و البته راست می‌گفت، اما عشقش از محدوده‌ی تمنای بدنی بسیار فراتر می‌رفت. دیگر خود وجود اودت در آن چندان جایی نداشت.”

LoveRomanceRelationshipsHeartbreakEmotionsعشقرابطهجداییاحساساتشکست
Book:Swann’s Way
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“فردای آن روز [سوان] به خود می‌گفت: «واقعا پیشرفت محسوس است؛ خوب که به قضیه دقیق می‌شوم، می‌بینم که دیروز از بودن با او تقریبا هیچ لذت نمی‌بردم: عجیب است که حتی به نظرم زشت می‌رسید.» و البته راست می‌گفت، اما عشقش از محدوده‌ی تمنای بدنی بسیار فراتر می‌رفت. دیگر خود وجود اودت در آن چندان جایی نداشت.”

LoveRomanceRelationshipsHeartbreakEmotionsعشقرابطهجداییاحساساتشکست
Book:Swann’s Way
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“He could see her, but dared not remain for fear of annoying her by seeming to be spying upon the pleasures which she tasted in other company, pleasures which - while he drove home in utter loneliness, and went to bed, as anxiously as I myself was to go to bed, some years later, on the evenings when he came to dine with us at Combray - seemed illimitable to him since he had not been able to see their end.”

LovePleasureLonelinessSuspicion
Book:Swann’s Way
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“In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her. And 50, at an age when it would appear - since one seeks in love before everything else a subjective pleasure - that the taste for feminine beauty must play the larger part in its procreation, love may come into being, love of the most physical order, without any foundation in desire. At this time of life a man has already been wounded more than once by the darts of love; it no longer evolves by itself, obeying its own incomprehensible and fatal laws, before his passive and astonished heart. We come to its aid; we falsify it by memory and by suggestion; recognising one of its symptoms we recall and recreate the rest.”

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Book:Swann’s Way
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“Among all the modes by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time. For then the die is cast, the person whose company we enjoy at that moment is the person we shall henceforward love. It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when — in this moment of deprivation — the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage — the insensate, agonising need to possess exclusively.”

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Book:Swann’s Way
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“When Jean and his mother left Etreuilles, Monsieur Sureau had gathered for them great boxfuls of hawthorn and of snowballs which Madame Santeuil had not the courage to refuse. But, as soon as Jean's uncle had gone home, she threw them away, saying that they already had more than enough in the way of luggage. And then Jean cried because he had been separated from the darling creatures which he would have liked to take with him to Paris, and because of his mother's naughtiness.”

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Book:Jean Santeuil
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“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.”

LoveDeathLossGriefMourningMothers
Author:Marcel Proust
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“When Odette ceased to be for him a creature always absent, longed for, imaginary, when the feeling he had for her was no longer the same mysterious disturbance caused in him by the phrase from the sonata, but affection, gratitude, when normal relations were established between them that would put an end to his madness and his gloom, then no doubt the actions of Odette's daily life would appear to him of little interest in themselves... (p. 302, In Search of Lost Time Vol. 1 The Way by Swann's, Lydia Davis translation)”

LoveInfatuation
Author:Marcel Proust
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“He made what apology he could and hurried home, overjoyed that the satisfaction of his curiosity had preserved their love intact, and that, having feigned for so long, when in Odette's company, a sort of indifference, he had not now, by a demonstration of jealousy, given her that proof of the excess of his own passion which, in a pair of lovers, fully and finally dispenses the recipient from the obligation to love the other enough. He never spoke to her of this misadventure, he cased even to think of it himself. But now and then his thoughts in their wandering course would come upon this memory where it lay unobserved, would startle it into life, thrust it more deeply down into his consciousness, and leave him aching with a sharp, far-rooted pain.”

LoveDesireLonging
Book:Swann’s Way
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“If a memory or a particular sadness we feel is capable of disappearing, to the point where we no longer notice it, it can also return and sometimes remain there for a long time. There were evenings when, as I crossed the town on my way to the restaurant, I felt so great a pang of longing for Mme de Guermantes that it took my breath away: it was as if part of my breast had been cut out by a skilled anatomist and replaced by an equal part of immaterial suffering, by an equivalent degree of nostalgia and love. And however neat the surgeon’s stitches are, life is rather painful when longing for another person is substituted for the intestines; it seems to occupy more space than they do; it is a constantly felt presence; and then, how utterly unsettling it is to be obliged to think with part of the body! Yet it does somehow make us feel more authentic.”

LoveMemoryNostalgiaProustMarcelproust
Book:The Guermantes Way
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“For, 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.”

LoveRegretSpite
Book:In the shadow of young girls in flower
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“He went farther; agonised by the reflection, at the moment when it passed by him, so near and yet so infinitely remote, that, while it was addressed to their ears, it knew them not, he would regret, almost, that it had a meaning of its own, an intrinsic and unalterable beauty, foreign to themselves, just as in the jewels given to us, or even in the letters written to us by a woman with whom we are in love, we find fault with the 'water' of a stone, or with the words of a sentence because they are not fashioned exclusively from the spirit of a fleeting intimacy and of a 'lass unaparalleled.”

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Book:Swann’s Way
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“No doubt, few people understand either the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon of love, or how it creates a supplementary person who is quite different from the one who bears our beloved’s name in the outside world, and is mostly formed from elements within ourselves. So there are few who see anything natural in the disproportionate dimensions which we come to perceive in a person who is not the same as the one they see.”

LoveProustSwanMarcelproust
Author:Marcel Proust
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“These new words were heard by my love; they persuaded it that the next day would not be different from what all the other days had been; that Gilberte’s feeling for me, already too old to be able to change, was indifference; that in my friendship with Gilberte, I was the only one who loved. “It’s true,” my love answered, “there’s nothing more to be done with this friendship, it won’t change.” And so, the very next day (or waiting for a public holiday if there was one coming up soon, or an anniversary, or the New Year perhaps, one of those days which are not like the others, when time makes a fresh start by rejecting the heritage of the past, by not accepting the legacy of its sorrows) I would ask Gilberte to give up our old friendship and lay the foundations of a new one.”

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Author:Marcel Proust
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“All I could remember was her smile. Unable to picture the loved face, however strenuously I tried to make myself remember it, I was for ever irritated to find that my memory had retained exact replicas of the striking and futile faces of the roundabout man and the barley-sugar woman, just as the bereaved, who each night search their dreams in vain for the lost beloved, will find their sleep is peopled by all manner of exasperating and unbearable intruders, whom they have always found, even in the waking world, more than dislikable. Faced with the impossibility of seeing clearly the object of their grief, they come close to accusing themselves of not grieving, just as I was tempted to believe that my inability to “remember the features of Gilberte’s face meant that I had forgotten her and had stopped loving her.”

LoveProustMarcelproustGilberteswannLoversdiscourse
Book:In the shadow of young girls in flower
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“Gilberte had still not come back to the Champs-Élysées. Yet I very much needed to set eyes on her, as I could not even remember her face. When we look at the person we love, our inquisitive, anxious, demanding gaze, our expectation of the words which will make us hope for (or despair of) another meeting tomorrow and, until those words are spoken, our obsession fluctuating between possible joy and sorrow, or imagining both of these together, all this distracts our tremulous attention and prevents it from getting a clear picture of the loved one. Also, it may be that this simultaneous activity of all the senses, striving to discover through the unaided eyes something that is out of their reach, is too mindful of the countless forms, all the savours and movements of the living person, all those things which, in a person with whom we are not in love, we immobilize. But the beloved model keeps moving; and the only snapshots we can take are always out of focus. I could not really say what the features of Gilberte’s face were like, except at those heavenly moments when she was there, displaying them to me.”

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Book:In the shadow of young girls in flower
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“There was a mild, damp wind blowing. It was weather I was quite familiar with; and a sudden feeling and presentiment ran through me: that New Year’s Day was not a day that differed from any other, not the first day of a new life when I could remake the acquaintance of Gilberte with the die still uncast, as though on the very first day of Creation when no past yet existed, as though the sorrows she had sometimes caused me had been wiped out, and with them all the future ones they might portend, as though I lived in a new world in which nothing remained of the old except one thing: my wish that Gilberte would love me. I realized that, since my heart yearned in this way for the redesign of a universe which had not satisfied it, this meant that my heart had not changed; and I could see there was no reason why Gilberte’s should have changed either. I sensed that, though it was a new friendship for me, it would not be a new friendship for her, just as no years are ever separated from each other by a frontier, and that though[…]“it was a new friendship for me, it would not be a new friendship for her, just as no years are ever separated from each other by a frontier, and that though we may put different names to them, they remain beyond the reach of our yearnings, unaware of these and unaffected by them. Though I might dedicate this year to Gilberte, though I might try to imprint upon New Year’s Day the special notion I had made up for it, as a religion is superimposed on the blind workings of nature, it was in vain: I was aware that this day did not know it was called New Year’s Day, and that it was coming to an end in the twilight in a way that was not unknown to me. What I recognized, what I sensed “in that mild wind blowing about the Morris column with its posters, was the reappearance of former times, with the never-ending unchangingness of their substance, their familiar dampness, their ignorant fluidity.”

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Author:Marcel Proust
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