Quotes by Proust, Marcel

Marcel-Valentin-Louis-Eugne-Georges Proust (July 10, 1871 November 18, 1922) was a French intellectual, novelist, essayist and critic, best known as the author of In Search of Lost Time (in French la recherche du temps perdu, also translated previously as Remembrance of Things Past), a monumental work of twentieth-century fiction consisting of seven volumes published over 14 years (the last three volumes were published posthumously)..

"It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship."

Proust, Marcel on bed

Bookmark quote

"Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change."

Proust, Marcel on change
11 fans of this quote

Bookmark quote

"The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing."

Proust, Marcel on charm

Bookmark quote

"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book."

Proust, Marcel on childhood
6 fans of this quote

Bookmark quote

"What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us."

Proust, Marcel on things and little things

Bookmark quote

"Life is extraordinarily suave and sweet with certain natural, witty, affectionate people who have unusual distinction and are capable of every vice, but who make a display of none in public and about whom no one can affirm they have a single one. There is something supple and secret about them. Besides, their perversity gives spice to their most innocent occupations, such as taking a walk in the garden at night."

Proust, Marcel on vice

Bookmark quote

"No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice."

Proust, Marcel on vice

Bookmark quote

"A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves."

Proust, Marcel on weather

Bookmark quote

"I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter."

Proust, Marcel on writers and writing

Bookmark quote

"I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant."

Proust, Marcel on creativity
4 fans of this quote