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Marcel Proust Quotes

Browse 25 quotes about Marcel Proust.

Marcel Proust Quotes

“Eventually... for me by the time you're 25 or so, you just start running out of shit to do. Books to read... people to meet. I was too chicken to be an "entrepreneur" in college and I wish that back then someone told me... stressed to me, that if you score above a certain percentile on the SAT.... you just won't be running into too many people... who have the credibility to tell you what to do. And they say I can't Drink anymore, either. So now... what?”

WritingPhilosophyEducationHumilityBoredomAlcoholismMarcel ProustRaison D êTre
Author:Dmitry Dyatlov
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“M. Proust was more severe than M. de Caillavet on Anatole France: "He was selfish and supercilious. He had read so much that he had left his heart in other people's books, and all that remained was dryness. One day I asked him how he came to know so much. He said, 'Not by being such a handsome young man as you. I wasn't in demand, and instead of going out I studied and learned'.”

ReadingEnvyPopularitySnobberyPedantryMarcel ProustAnatole FranceDryness
Book:Monsieur Proust
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“Recalling, some time later, what I had felt at the time, I distinguished the impression of having been held for a moment in her mouth, myself, naked, without any of the social attributes which belonged equally to her other playmates and, when she used my surname, to my parents, accessories of which her lips - by the effort she made, a little after her father's manner, to articulate the words to which she wished to give a special emphasis - had the air of stripping, of divesting me, like the skin from a fruit of which one can swallow only the pulp, while her glance, adapting itself to the same new degree of intimacy as her speech, fell on me also more directly and testified to the consciousness, the pleasure, even the gratitude that it felt by accompanying itself with a smile.”

ProustMarcel ProustRemembrance Of Things PastSwann S Way
Author:Marcel Proust
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“Some details in life may look insignificant but appear to be vital leitmotifs in a person's life. They may have the value of "Rosebuds" of Citizen Kane or "Madeleine cookies" of Marcel Proust or "Strawberry fields" of the Beatles. People regularly walk down the memory lane of their early youth. The paper boats of their childhood are recurrently floating on the waves of their mind and bring back the mood and the spirit of the early days. They enable us to retreat from the trivial, daily worries and can generate delightful bliss and true joy in a sometimes frantic and chaotic life. ("Paper boats forever" )”

LifeMindJoySpiritChildhoodFieldsYouthValueDetailsMoodBlissRetreatDelightfulFloatingInsignificantCookiesChaoticWavesFranticDailyWorriesThe BeatlesVitalRosebudsTrivialMarcel ProustCitizen KaneStrawberryMemory LaneMadeleinePaper BoatsWalk DownBring BackLeitmotif
Author:Erik Pevernagie
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“Kilmartin wrote a highly amusing and illuminating account of his experience as a Proust revisionist, which appeared in the first issue of Ben Sonnenberg's quarterly Grand Street in the autumn of 1981. The essay opened with a kind of encouragement: 'There used to be a story that discerning Frenchmen preferred to read Marcel Proust in English on the grounds that the prose of A la recherche du temps perdu was deeply un-French and heavily influenced by English writers such as Ruskin.' I cling to this even though Kilmartin thought it to be ridiculous Parisian snobbery; I shall never be able to read Proust in French, and one's opportunities for outfacing Gallic self-regard are relatively scarce.”

ParisEssaysFrenchEnglishSnobberyMarcel ProustRevisionismFrench People1981In Search Of Lost TimeJohn RuskinBen SonnenbergGrand Street MagazineTerence Kilmartin
Book:Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
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“»So yes, Mann, Proust, and Joyce showed that the universal gesture was possible, though the nature of the gesture in their work remains deeply ambiguous. The books are crammed with real life, but they are also dream books, fantasies. They explore a range of ways of explaining the world and then retract them. They offer paths to freedom but are almost hermetically sealed; they speak for everyone, yet they are self-absorbed; they are new but also oddly archaic; they contain the whole of reality but are wholly devoted to art.« – Edwin Frank: Stranger than Fiction : Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel. - London : Fern Press, 2024. - Page 186”

Thomas MannMarcel ProustJames Joyce
Book:Stranger Than Fiction
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“This compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without result was so cruel that one day, noticing a swelling over his stomach, he felt an actual joy in the idea that he had, perhaps, a tumor that would prove fatal, that he need not concern himself with anything further, since it was this malady that was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the not-distant end. If indeed, at his period, it often happened that, though without admitting it even to himself, he longed for death, it was in order to escape not so much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the monotony of his struggle.”

LiteratureClassicFrenchProustModernistMarcel ProustIn Search Of Lost TimeSwann S WayOdetteSwannFrench LitClassic Lit
Book:Swann’s Way
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“He suffered greatly from being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounded him all the more cruelly since, being ignorant of his love, incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest, or of doing more than smile at it as at some childish joke, or deplore it as an act of insanity, they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective state which existed for himself alone, whose reality there was nothing external to confirm; he suffered overwhelmingly, to the point at which even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry, from having to prolong his exile in this place to which Odette would never come, in which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was entirely absent.”

LoveLove QuotesMelancholyFrenchClassicsProustFrench LiteratureModernistMarcel ProustIn Search Of Lost TimeSwann S WaySwannFrench LitFrench Writers
Book:Swann’s Way
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“Ogni mediazione proietta un suo miraggio; i miraggi si susseguono come altrettante "verità" che subentrino alle verità anteriori come una vera e propria uccisione del ricordo vivente e si proteggano dalle verità future con una censura implacabile dell'esperienza quotidiana. Marcel Proust chiama "Io" i "mondi" proiettati dalle successive mediazioni. Gli Io sono perfettamente isolati gli uni dagli altri, incapaci di rammentarsi degli Io passati o di presagire gli Io futuri.”

DesireIdentityExpectationsExperiencesProustMarcel ProustIoGirardDesiderio Triangolare
Book:Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure
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“Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.”

Charles DickensMarcel ProustGustave FlaubertWilla CatherAnthony TrollopeKatherine Anne PorterSidonie Gabrielle ColetteWilliam Makepeace Thackeray
Book:Conversations with Capote
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