As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our...

To see how pretty an old woman once was, it is not enough just to look at each feature; they must be translated.

Now I could appreciate the merits of a broad, poetical, powerful interpretation, or rather it was to this that those epithets were conventionally applied, but only as we give the names of Mars, Venus, Saturn...

So we don’t believe that life is beautiful because we don’t recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love...

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions

We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence.

And what little she allowed herself to say was said in a strained tone, in which her ingrained timidity paralysed her tendency to freedom and audacity of speech.

As soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral.

She was not yet dead. But I was already alone.

The Princess of Parma was a Courvoisier in that she was incapable of innovation in social matters, but unlike the Courvoisiers in that the surprises the Duchesse de Guermantes perpetually held in store for her...

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

It has since struck me as one of the most touching aspects of the part played in life by these idle, painstaking women that they devote all their generosity, all their talent, their transferable dreams...

What had to move – a leaf of the chestnut tree, for instance – moved.

… rejoicing in a peace which brings only an increase of anxiety,…

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells,...

I loved her [Gilberte]; I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to hurt her, to force her to keep some memory of me. I thought her so...

In the V-shaped opening of her crape bodice Mlle. Vinteuil felt the sting of her friend’s sudden kiss;…

Apenas discerni que repetir o que toda a gente pensava não era em política um sinal de inferioridade, mas de superioridade.

My body, still too heavy with sleep to move…

At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their...

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...

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one else can spare us, for our wisdom...

…the novelist has brought us to that state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied tenfold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a...

And the others too were beginning to remark in Swann that abnormal, excessive, shameful and deserved senescence of bachelors, of all those for whom it seems that the great day which knows no morrow must...

It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

La vera terra dei barbari non è quella che non ha mai conosciuto l’arte, ma quella che, disseminata di capolavori, non sa né apprezzarli né conservarli.

… which would enable him to prolong for the time being, and to renew for one day more the disappointment, the torturing deception that must always come to him with the vain presence of this...

the comfort of reclusion, the poetry of hibernation

While Elstir, at my request, went on painting, I wandered about in the half-light, stopping to examine first one picture, then another.Most of those that covered the walls were not what I should chiefly have...

The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.

Unkindness is inspired by hatred, anger fuels it into action in which there is no great joy; it would take sadism to turn it into something pleasurable; unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain...

… the reigns of the kings and queens who are portrayed as kneeling with clasped hands in the windows of churches, were stained by oppression and bloodshed.

And so her parents-in-law, whom she still regarded as the most eminent people in France, declared that she was an angel; all the more so because they preferred to appear, in marrying their son to...

… she had uttered these words simply in order to provoke a reply in certain other words, which she seemed, indeed, to wish to hear spoken, but, from prudence, would let her friend be the...

For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely grief.

It was that evening, when my mother abdicated her authority, that marked the beginning, along with the slow death of my grandmother, of the decline of my will and of my health. Everything had been...

I spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was watching her sleep.

In the case of Albertine, I felt that I should never discover anything, that, out of that tangled mass of details of fact and falsehood, I should never unravel the truth: and that it would...

I felt less unhappy than usual because her melancholy expression, the way the vivid colour of her dress almost cut her off from the rest of the world, made her seem somehow lonely and unhappy,...

One felt that in her renunciation of life she had deliberately abandoned those places in which she might at least have been able to see the man she loved, for others where he had never...

Hoeveel bedroevender nog dan vroeger vond ik het sedert die dag (…) dat ik geen aanleg voor schrijven had en ervan moest afzien ooit een beroemde schrijver te worden.

My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.

Gardeners produce flowers that are delicious dreams, and others too that are like nightmares.

She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive.

… 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...

Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one’s eyes, of the various events of one’s life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables ones to resuscitate dead...

Lying is essential to humanity. It plays as large a part perhaps as the quest for pleasure, and is moreover governed by that quest. One lies in order to protect one’s pleasure, or one’s honour...

Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged...

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.

Now my uncle knew many of them personally, and also ladies of another class, not clearly distinguished from actresses in my mind. He used to entertain them at his house.