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Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust Quotes

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Famous Marcel Proust Quotes

“The fact of the matter is that, since we are determined always to keep our feelings to ourselves, we have never given any thought to the manner in which we should express them. And suddenly there is within us a strange and obscene animal making itself heard, whose tones may inspire as much alarm in the person who receives the involuntary, elliptical and almost irresistible communication of one's defect or vice as would the sudden avowal indirectly and outlandishly proffered by a criminal who can no longer refrain from confessing to a murder of which one had never imagined him to be guilty.”

ShouldMayPersonsMatterFactsFeelingsGivenAnimalEmotionHeardInspireStrangeCommunicationMurderVicesDeterminedCriminalsGuiltyToneDefectsAlarmsIrresistibleRefrainObsceneInvoluntaryConfessing
Book:In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way
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“We can sometimes find a person again, but we cannot abolish time. And so on until the unforeseen day, gloomy as a winter night, when one no longer seeks that girl, or any other, when to find her would actually scare one. For one no longer feels that one has attractions enough to please, or strength enough to love. Not, of course, that one is in the strict sense of the word impotent. And as for loving, one would love more than ever. But one feels that it is too big an undertaking for the little strength one has left.”

FeelsLittlesPersonsSometimesEnoughBigsNightGirlCoursesLeftPleaseWinterAttractionScareStrictUndertakingsAbolishGloomyThat GirlUnforeseenWinter Night
Book:In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)
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“And indeed when we are no longer in love with women whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss of death between them and ourselves, just as much as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that we are no longer in love makes the people that they were or the person that we were then as good as dead?”

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Book:Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)
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“... But all the feelings that evoke in us the joy or the misfortune of a real person are only produced in us through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist was in understanding that, in the apparatus of our emotions, since the image is the only essential element, the simplification which consists of purely and simply suppressing the factual characters is a definitive improvement.”

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Author:Marcel Proust
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“There is probably not one person, however great his virtue, who cannot be led by the complexities of life's circumstances to a familiarity with the vices he condemns the most vehemently--without his completely recognizing this vice which, disguised as certain events, touches him and wounds him: strange words, an inexplicable attitude, on a given night, of the person whom he otherwise has so many reasons to love.”

PersonsReasonNightCertainGivenAttitudeVirtueEventsStrangeCircumstancesVicesWoundsToleranceComplexityRecognizingFamiliarityInexplicableReason To Love
Author:Marcel Proust
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“No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.”

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Book:Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)
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“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. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.”

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Author:Marcel Proust
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“The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.”

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Book:In Search Of Lost Time, Vol 5: The Captive & The Fugitive
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“A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.”

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Author:Marcel Proust
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