Marcelproust Quotes

“No doubt, few people understand either the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon of love, or how it creates a supplementary person who is quite different from the one who bears our beloved’s name in the outside world, and is mostly formed from elements within ourselves. So there are few who see anything natural in the disproportionate dimensions which we come to perceive in a person who is not the same as the one they see.”
― Marcel Proust

“These new words were heard by my love; they persuaded it that the next day would not be different from what all the other days had been; that Gilberte’s feeling for me, already too old to be able to change, was indifference; that in my friendship with Gilberte, I was the only one who loved. “It’s true,” my love answered, “there’s nothing more to be done with this friendship, it won’t change.” And so, the very next day (or waiting for a public holiday if there was one coming up soon, or an anniversary, or the New Year perhaps, one of those days which are not like the others, when time makes a fresh start by rejecting the heritage of the past, by not accepting the legacy of its sorrows) I would ask Gilberte to give up our old friendship and lay the foundations of a new one.”
― Marcel Proust

“All I could remember was her smile. Unable to picture the loved face, however strenuously I tried to make myself remember it, I was for ever irritated to find that my memory had retained exact replicas of the striking and futile faces of the roundabout man and the barley-sugar woman, just as the bereaved, who each night search their dreams in vain for the lost beloved, will find their sleep is peopled by all manner of exasperating and unbearable intruders, whom they have always found, even in the waking world, more than dislikable. Faced with the impossibility of seeing clearly the object of their grief, they come close to accusing themselves of not grieving, just as I was tempted to believe that my inability to “remember the features of Gilberte’s face meant that I had forgotten her and had stopped loving her.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“Gilberte had still not come back to the Champs-Élysées. Yet I very much needed to set eyes on her, as I could not even remember her face. When we look at the person we love, our inquisitive, anxious, demanding gaze, our expectation of the words which will make us hope for (or despair of) another meeting tomorrow and, until those words are spoken, our obsession fluctuating between possible joy and sorrow, or imagining both of these together, all this distracts our tremulous attention and prevents it from getting a clear picture of the loved one. Also, it may be that this simultaneous activity of all the senses, striving to discover through the unaided eyes something that is out of their reach, is too mindful of the countless forms, all the savours and movements of the living person, all those things which, in a person with whom we are not in love, we immobilize. But the beloved model keeps moving; and the only snapshots we can take are always out of focus. I could not really say what the features of Gilberte’s face were like, except at those heavenly moments when she was there, displaying them to me.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“If a memory or a particular sadness we feel is capable of disappearing, to the point where we no longer notice it, it can also return and sometimes remain there for a long time. There were evenings when, as I crossed the town on my way to the restaurant, I felt so great a pang of longing for Mme de Guermantes that it took my breath away: it was as if part of my breast had been cut out by a skilled anatomist and replaced by an equal part of immaterial suffering, by an equivalent degree of nostalgia and love. And however neat the surgeon’s stitches are, life is rather painful when longing for another person is substituted for the intestines; it seems to occupy more space than they do; it is a constantly felt presence; and then, how utterly unsettling it is to be obliged to think with part of the body! Yet it does somehow make us feel more authentic.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“There was a mild, damp wind blowing. It was weather I was quite familiar with; and a sudden feeling and presentiment ran through me: that New Year’s Day was not a day that differed from any other, not the first day of a new life when I could remake the acquaintance of Gilberte with the die still uncast, as though on the very first day of Creation when no past yet existed, as though the sorrows she had sometimes caused me had been wiped out, and with them all the future ones they might portend, as though I lived in a new world in which nothing remained of the old except one thing: my wish that Gilberte would love me. I realized that, since my heart yearned in this way for the redesign of a universe which had not satisfied it, this meant that my heart had not changed; and I could see there was no reason why Gilberte’s should have changed either. I sensed that, though it was a new friendship for me, it would not be a new friendship for her, just as no years are ever separated from each other by a frontier, and that though[…]“it was a new friendship for me, it would not be a new friendship for her, just as no years are ever separated from each other by a frontier, and that though we may put different names to them, they remain beyond the reach of our yearnings, unaware of these and unaffected by them. Though I might dedicate this year to Gilberte, though I might try to imprint upon New Year’s Day the special notion I had made up for it, as a religion is superimposed on the blind workings of nature, it was in vain: I was aware that this day did not know it was called New Year’s Day, and that it was coming to an end in the twilight in a way that was not unknown to me. What I recognized, what I sensed “in that mild wind blowing about the Morris column with its posters, was the reappearance of former times, with the never-ending unchangingness of their substance, their familiar dampness, their ignorant fluidity.”
― Marcel Proust

“Mas ni desde la óptica de las cosas de menor significado somos los hombres un conjunto materialmente establecido, semejante para todos, y del que cualquiera puede saber, tal como si fuésemos un documento de condiciones o un testamento. Nuestra naturaleza social es una construcción del pensamiento de los otros e incluso esa acción tan sencilla que denominamos " ver a uno que conocemos" es parcialmente de índole intelectual. Completamos el aspecto físico de aquel que tenemos frente a nosotros con la sumad e los conceptos que elaboramos sobre él, la imagen completa que nos formamos de él está compuesta en su mayor proporción por esos conceptos, los que terminan por insuflar en tal medida sus mejillas, por establecer con tal absoluta adhesión el corte de sus narices y por darle tan sutilmente el tono a lo sonoro de su voz, como si esta no fuese otra cosa que un traslúcido envase. En cada ocasión en la que observamos ese semblante y escuchamos dicha voz, aquello que se aprecia son esos conceptos.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way