… was the great and general renunciation which old age makes in preparation for death, the chrysalis stage of life, which may be observed wherever life has been unduly prolonged; even in old lovers who...

Swann, with that almost arrogant charity of a man of the world who, amid the dissolution of all his own moral prejudices, finds in another’s shame merely a reason for treating him with a friendly...

As soon as jealousy is discovered, it is regarded by the person who is its object as a challenge which justifies deception.

I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it–our life–hides from us, made invisible...

… until it had acquired the strength to create in my mind a fresh example of absolute, unproductive beauty…

She’s got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.

I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant,...

Every individual who makes us suffer can be attached by us to a divinity of which he or she is a mere fragmentary reflexion, the lowest step in the ascent that leads to it, a...

It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as there is a choice it can only be a bad one.

Was the happiness of knowing these girls really unattainable? It would certainly not have been the first happiness of that sort which I had abandoned all hope of ever enjoying?

…because he knew that for other people their own social obligations took precedence of the death of afriend, and could put himself in her place by dint of his instinctivepoliteness.

A man who, night after night, falls like a lump of lead upon his bed, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will such a man ever dream of making,...

Her mind, shaped so long before my own, was for me the equivalent of what had been offered me by the behaviour of the girls of the little gang along the sea-shore. Mme de Guermantes...

All the products of one period have something in common; the artists who illustrate the poetry of their generation are the same artists who are employed by the big financial houses. And nothing reminds me...

To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is...

She’s on the stairs, ma’am, getting her breath,’ said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she...

I did not wait to hear the end of my father’s story, for I had been with him myself after mass when we had met M. Legrandin; instead, I went downstairs to the kitchen to...

I dined with Legrandin on the terrace of his house by moonlight. “There is a charming quality, is there not,” he said to me, “in this silence; for hearts that are wounded, as mine is,...

He [Bloch] was one of those touchy, highly-strung people who cannot bear to have made a blunder, will not admit it to themselves, and whose whole day is ruined by it.

… since I was still, and must for long remain, in that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one...

The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still with its...

Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called ‘useful,’ when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking-stick, she would choose ‘antiques,’ as though their...

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen...