Quotes Reviews |
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As Proust has been such a recent 'force' in our lives, we thought it time he had a page of his own. Despite his own unexemplary life, there's so much wit and wisdom hidden in his pages that we believe these gems should be disinterred and presented, unclothed in contextual garments, to a world that might shy away from the works as a whole, given their formidable thickness per volume, never mind considered as a whole.
So we'll begin with a salvo of quotes, some epigrammatic, some lyrical, then see how it goes from there. Savour them, as Proust would have done the sensations and reflections that produced these utterances.
"Blue-tits came and perched upon the branches and fluttered among the indulgent flowers, as though it had been an amateur of exotic art and colours who had created this living beauty. But it moved one to tears because, to whatever lengths it went in its effects of refined artifice, one felt that it was natural, that these apple-trees were there in the heart of the country, like peasants on the high roads of France.
Then the rays of the sun gave place suddenly to those of the rain; they streaked the whole horizon, enclosing the line of apple -trees in their grey net. But these continued to hold aloft their pink and blossoming beauty, in the wind that had turned icy beneath the drenching rain; it was a day in spring."
"But already, upon her features, astonishment and anger had vanished beneath a dark and sticky smile of transcendent pity and philosophical irony, a viscous liquid secreted, in order to heal her wound, by her outraged self-esteem."
"As on the ground the drifting leaves, so up above the clouds were chasing the wind. And a stream of migrant evenings, of which a sort of conic section cut into the sky made visible the successive layers, pink, blue and green, were gathered in readiness for departure to warmer climes.
".....friendship, the whole effort of which is directed towards making us sacrifice the only part of ourselves that is real and incommunicable (otherwise than by means of art) to a superficial self which, unlike the other, finds no joy in its own being, but rather a vague, sentimental glow at feeling itself supported by external props, hospitalised in an extraneous individuality, where, happy in the protection that is afforded there, it expresses its well-being in warm approval and marvels at qualities which it would denounce as failings and seek to correct in itself."
"But whatever might be my opinion of friendship, to mention only the pleasure that it procured me, of a quality so mediocre as to be like something half-way between physical exhaustion and mental boredom, there is no brew so deadly that it cannot at certain moments become precious and invigorating by giving us just the stimulus that was necessary, the warmth that we cannot generate ourselves."
".... those glittering fragments had reassembled like the green and roseate reflexions of the sunset behind the oar that has broken them."
"So it is when some cruel trick of chance prevents our intelligent and pious tenderness from coming forward in time to hide from our eyes what they ought never to behold, when it is forestalled by our eyes, and they, arriving first in the field and having it to themselves, set to work mechanically, like films, and show us, in place of the beloved person who has long ago ceased to exist but whose death our tenderness has always hitherto kept concealed from us, the new person whom a hundred times daily it has clothed with a loving and mendacious likeness."
"...just as in a restaurant, a great but unknown artist whose genius is written neither in the lines of his shy face nor in the antiquated cut of his threadbare coat, would willingly change places with the young stock-jobber from the lowest ranks of society, who is sitting with a couple of actresses at a neighbouring table to which in an obsequious and incessant chain come hurrying owner, manager, waiters, bell-hops, and even the scullions who file out of the kitchen to salute him, as in the fairy tales, while the wine waiter advances, as dust-covered as his bottles, limping and dazed as if, on his way up from the cellar, he had twisted his foot before emerging into the light of day."
"We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be."
"Our farthest-reaching resolutions are always made in a short lived state of mind."
"If we are to make reality endurable we must all nourish a fancy or two."
"The soldier is convinced that an indefinitely extendable period must elapse before he will be killed, the thief before he will be arrested, all of us before we must die."
"However much one may savour one's poison, when one has been forcibly deprived of it for any length of time, one is bound to be struck by how restful it can be to do without it, by the absence of excitements and sorrows."
"....the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best part of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried can make us weep again."
"Were it not for habit, life should seem delightful to beings constantly under threat of dying, in other words to all human kind."
"That is how I see her to this day: standing there, her eyes shining under her toque, silhouetted against the backdrop of the sea, and separated from me by the transparent sky-blue stretch of time elapsed since that moment....."
"Even conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression, through which we can make no acquisition. We may converse our whole life away, without speaking anything other than the interminable repetitions that fill the vacant minute; but the steps of thought which we take during the lonely work of artistic creation all lead us downwards, deeper into ourselves, the only direction in which we can advance, albeit with much greater travail, towards an outcome of truth."
".... the lie which tries to have us believe we are not inescapably alone in the world, and which, when we converse with someone, prevents us from admitting that it is not we who are speaking, that at such times we try to take on the semblance of other people, rather than be the self which differs from them."
In Search of Lost Time (A la Recherche de Temps Perdu) - Marcel Proust
Part I - Swann's Way
Part II - In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Part III - The Guermantes Way
Part IV - Sodom and Gomorrah
Part V – The Captive and The
Fugitive
How Proust can change your Life - Alain de Botton
