But the true nature which we repress continues nevertheless to abide within us. Thus it is that at times, if we read the latest masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find...

I was so much in the habit of having Albertine with me, and now I suddenly saw a new aspect of Habit. Hitherto I had regarded it chiefly as an annihilating force which suppresses the...

Just is not by other men of intelligence that an intelligent an is afraid of being thought a fool, so it is not by the great gentleman but by boors and ‘bounders’ that a man...

… so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the...

Quartering the topmost branches of one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but...

Dromedary resting.

Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one’s life to women than to postage stamps, old snuff-boxes, or even to paintings and statues.

… it was with an unusual intensity of pleasure, a pleasure destined to have a lasting effect upon his character and conduct…

His [Morel’s] nature was really like a sheet of paper that has been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten it out.

But sometimes it is just when everything seems to be lost that we experience a presentiment that may save us; one has knocked on all the doors which lead nowhere, and then, unwittingly, one pushes...

In Swann’s mind, however, these words, meeting no opposition, settled and hardened until they assumed the indestructibility of a truth so indubitable that, if some friend happened to tell him that he had come by...

In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision...

But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real point of intersection between reality and dream.

[…] they imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations either a fantastic indifference or a sustained and...

We consider it innocent to desire, and heinous that the other person should do so.

To determine not to think of it was but to think of it still, to suffer from it still.

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...

Alix bore the blow without flinching. A block of marble. Her gaze was piercing and blank, her nose nobly arched. But one cheek was flaking. A hint of strange green and pink vegetation was invading...

… with a quiet suggestion of infinity…

No doubt my books too, like my mortal being, would eventually die, one day. But one has to resign oneself to dying. One accepts the thought that in ten years oneself, in a hundred years...

The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which...

My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it could play the piano, I am sure it...

Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as the artist. But they do...

Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have...

There is no man…however wise, who has not at some period in his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it....

… novels contained something inexpressibly delicious.

A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.

Nous disons bien que l’heure de la mort est incertaine, mais quand nous disons cela, nous nous représentons cette heure comme située dans un espace vague et lointain, nous ne pensons pas qu’elle ait un...

Every person is destroyed when we cease to see him; after which his next appearance is a new creation, different from that which immediately preceded it, if not from them all.

A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the unexpected options that it reveals at one point, the impasse it presents at...

It’s far more difficult to disfigure a great work of art than to create one.

You know Balbec so well – do you have friends in the area?’I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore an inclement...

But when his mistress for the time being was a woman in society, or at least one whose birth was not so lowly, nor her position is so irregular that he was unable to arrange...

But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shews...

Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything, the brain emptied of that past which was life until then. And perhaps...

We forgive the crimes of individuals, but not their participation in a collective crime.

But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with...

Anxiously he explored every one of these vaguely seen shapes, as though among the phantoms of the dead, in the realms of darkness, he had been searching for a lost Eurydice.

Besides, those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians. As consolation can come to them only from the person who is the cause of their grief,...

… “Even 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?

One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.

… she exclaimed, the innate respectability of the middle-class housewife rising impulsively to the surface through the acquired dilettantism of the ‘light woman.’People who enjoyed ‘picking-up’ things, who admired poetry, despised sordid calculations of profit...

No doubt, having developed the habit, out of idleness, of each day putting off my work until the day after, I thought that death could be dealt with in the same way.

There is nothing like desire for obstructing any resemblance between what one says and what one has on one’s mind.

The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than any other thought.

… the burrowing wasp, which in order to provide a supply of fresh meat for her offspring after her own decease, calls in the science of anatomy to amplify the resources of her instinctive cruelty,...

…but the loss of a memory, like the omission of a phrase during reading, rather than making for uncertainty, can lead to a premature certainty.

… I felt that I was not penetrating to the full depth of my impression, that something more lay behind that mobility, that luminosity, something which they seemed at once to contain and to conceal.

… I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any other…