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...

Western civilisation, the élitists all understood, is built upon discrimination: a culture that does not rest on discrimination, that penalises people who discriminate, or rewards the undiscriminating, is worth very little and has only callow,...

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? (Just to give you an idea, Proust’s reply was ‘To be separated from Mama.’) I think that the lowest depth of misery ought to be...

I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence…

Reading Proust isn’t just reading a book, it’s an experience and you can’t reject an experience.

El pasado, decía Proust, no sólo es fugaz, es que no se mueve de sitio. Con París pasa lo mismo, jamás ha salido de viaje. Y encima es interminable, no se acaba nunca.

…the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

I do not mean, of course, that we can always accurately express our conscious thoughts with Proustian accuracy. Consciousness overflows language: we perceive vastly more than we can describe.

The enchantments of the past must always become the disenchantments of the future. But memory, a preservative, may intervene. The embalmer of original enchantments, it is the only human faculty that can outwit the advance...

…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.

Translation error is compounded by bias error. We distort others by forcing into them our preferred ideas and gestalts, a process Proust beautifully describes: We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with...

You’re as strong as the Pont Neuf. You’ll live to bury us all!

Anyone who’s read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles.

The variations of the Duchess’s judgment spared no one, except herhusband. He alone had never been in love with her, in him she hadalways felt an iron character, indifferent to the caprices that shedisplayed, contemptuous...

Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.

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...

I would show you this quality in all the writers whose works you read while I’m asleep, I would show you the same identity as in Vinteuil. These key-phrases, which you are beginning to recognise...

A real person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not...

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...

The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than...

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...

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...

Yet the Narrator’s quest is not only for his own identity and vocation. He seeks an understanding of art, sexuality and worldly and political affairs: he is a snoop and a voyeur; he comments and...

In the case of the solitary, his seclusion, even when it is absolute and ends only with life itself, has often as its primary cause a disordered love of the crowd, which so far overruled...

Only a determined and resourceful scholar could establish manuscript precedence – but in the race to masturbate on a printed page Proust definitely came first.

Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.