Marcel Proust : IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME = The Best Novel Ever Written!

I promise myself I'll work on this lens soon(ish) and make it wonderful. For now, here are some QUOTES! Randomly selected, but they might give you an idea of Proust's style.

Note: Roman numerals (for example, VI) refer to the individual books within The Novel (e.g., Sodom and Gomorrah is the fourth book, so IV).

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"One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy." (II 282)

"When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognize it as having originated in ourselves." (II 253)

"The soldier is convinced that a certain interval of time, capable of being indefinitely prolonged, will be allowed before the bullet finds him, the thief before he is caught, men in general before they have to die. That is the amulet which preserves people-and sometimes peoples-not from danger but from the fear of danger, in reality from the belief in danger, which in certain cases allows them to brave it without actually needing to be brave. It is confidence of this sort, and with as little foundation, that sustains the lover who is counting on a reconciliation, on a letter. For me to cease to expect a reconciliation, it would have sufficed that I should have ceased to wish for one." (II 252)

"The imagination, when it changes its nature and turns into sensibility, does not thereby acquire control of a large number of simultaneous images." (IV 710)

"The mistresses whom I have loved most passionately have never coincided with my love for them." (IV 718)

"[My love for them was genuine]... But it was more because they had the faculty of arousing that love, of raising it to a paroxysm, than because they were its image. When I saw them, when I heard their voices, I could find nothing in them which resembled my love and could account for it... It was as though a virtue that had no connection with them had been artificially attached to them by nature, and that this virtue, this quasi-electric power, had the effect upon me of exciting my love, that is to say of controlling all my actions and causing all my sufferings. But from this, the beauty, or the intelligence, or the kindness of these women was entirely distinct. As by an electric current that gives us a shock, I have been shaken by my loves, I have lived them, I have felt them: never have I succeeded in seeing or thinking them. Indeed I am inclined to believe that in these relationships (I leave out of account the physical pleasure which is their habitual accompaniment but is not enough in itself to constitute them), beneath the outward appearance of the woman, it is to those invisible forces with which she is incidentally accompanied that we address ourselves as to obscure deities." (IV 719)

"When sleep bore him so far away from the world inhabited by memory and thought, through an ether in which he was alone, more than alone, without even the companionship of self-perception, he was outside the range of time and its measurements." (IV 519)

"Perhaps every night we accept the risk of experiencing, while we are asleep, sufferings which we regard as null and void because they will be felt in the course of a sleep which we suppose to be unconscious... and I entered the realm of sleep, which is like a second dwelling into which we move for that one purpose... The race that inhabits it, like that of our first human ancestors, is androgynous. A man in it appears a moment later in the form of a woman. Things in it show a tendency to turn into men, men into friends and enemies. The time that elapses for the sleeper, during these spells of slumber, is absolutely different from the time in which the life of the waking man is passed... Then, in the chariot of sleep, we descend into depths in which memory can no longer keep up with it, and on the brink of which the mind has been obliged to retrace its steps. / The horses of sleep, like those of the sun, move at so steady a pace, in an atmosphere in which there is no longer any resistance, that it requires some little meteorite extraneous to ourselves (hurled from the azure by what Unknown?) to strike our regular sleep (which otherwise would have no reason to stop, and would continue with a similar motion world without end) and to make it swing sharply round, return towards reality, travel without pause, traverse the regions bordering on life-whose sounds the sleeper will presently hear, still vague but already perceptible even if distorted-and come to earth suddenly at the point of awakening. 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... Then, from the black storm through which we seem to have passed (but we do not even say we), we emerge prostate, without a thought, a we that is void of content. What hammer-blow has the person or thing that is lying there received to make it unconscious of everything, stupefied until the moment when memory, flooding back, restores to it consciousness of personality?" (IV 517-518)

"One can of course maintain that there is but one time, for the futile reason that it is by looking at the clock that one established as being merely a quarter of an hour what one had supposed a day. But at the moment of establishing this, one is precisely a man awake, immersed in the time of waking man, having deserted the other time. Perhaps indeed more than another time: another life. 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... It seems a positive waste. We have had pleasure in another life which is not ours. If we enter up in a budget the pains and pleasures of dreams (which generally vanish soon enough after our waking), it is not in the current account of our everyday life." (IV 519)

"She's full of fun. She never leaves a hotel without relieving herself first in a wardrobe or a drawer, just to leave a little keepsake with the chambermaid who'll have to clean up. Sometimes she does it in a cab, and after she's paid her fare, she'll hide behind a tree, and she doesn't half laugh when the cabby finds he's got to clean his cab after her." (IV 515)

"if there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on others." (IV 676)

"A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to posses other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; as this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star." (V 343)

"Vinteuil had been dead for a number of years; but in the sound of these instruments which he had loved, it had been given him to go on living, for an unlimited time, a part at least of his life. Of his life as a man solely? If art was indeed but a prolongation of life, was it worthwhile to sacrifice anything to it? Was it not as unreal as life itself?" (V 339)

"One remembers an atmosphere because girls were smiling in it." (V 323)

"Society is like sexual behavior, in that no one knows what perversions it may develop once aesthetic considerations are allowed to dictate its choices." (V 313)

"It is what is immediately above our heads that gives us the impression of altitude and not what is almost invisible to us, so far is it lost in the clouds." (V 306)

"The lie, the perfect lie, about people we know, about the relations we have had with them, about our motive for some action, formulated in totally different terms, the lie as to what we are, whom we love, what we feel with regard to people who love us and believe that they have fashioned us in their own image because they keep on kissing us morning, noon and night-that lie is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known." (V 282)

"No banishment, indeed, to the South Pole, or to the summit of Mont Blanc, can separate us so entirely from our fellow creatures as a prolonged sojourn in the bosom of an inner vice, that is to say of a way of thinking different from theirs." (V 275)

"What asylum doctor has not had his own attack of madness by dint of continual association with madmen? He is lucky if he is able to affirm that it is not a previous latent madness that had predestined him to look after them. The subject of a psychiatrist's study often rebounds on him. But before that, what obscure inclination, what dreadful fascination had made him choose that subject?" (V 272)

"It is the homosexuality that survives in spite of obstacles, shameful, execrated, that is the only true form, the only form that corresponds in one and the same person to an intensification of the intellectual qualities." (V 270)

"No doubt to every man the life of every other extends along shadowy paths of which he has no inkling." (V 268)

"And indeed I was well aware now that before I forgot her altogether, I should have to traverse in the opposite direction, like a traveler who returns by the same route to his starting-point, all the sentiments through which I had passed before arriving at my great love. But these stages, these moments of the past are not ...