this most wonderful of all days which had suddenly illuminated for me not only the old groping movements of my thought, but even the whole purpose of my life and perhaps of art itself

What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking

the better part of our memories exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, except what lay in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea

No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person the world knows by the same name

the piano-part beginning to emerge in a sort of liquid rippling of sound, multiform but indivisible, smooth yet restless

And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me

Hemingway Proust

“…I realised that dying was not something new, but that on the contrary since my childhood I had already died many times.” — Proust, Time Regained (tr. Scott Moncrieff et al.)

The pope gets it ...we should realize that literature is like “a telescope”, to use a well-known image of Marcel Proust. As such, it...enables us to realize “the immense distance” that separates the totality of human experience from our perception of it. theguardian.com/books/article/…

This was an allusion to a Zeppelin raid which had taken place the previous night and he went on to ask me if I had had a good view, very much as in the old days he might have questioned me about some spectacle of great aesthetic beauty.

At the front, I could see, there might be a sort of bravado in saying: “Isn’t it marvellous? What a pink! And that pale green!” when at any moment you might be killed, but here in Paris there could be no question of any such pose

The Méséglise way with its lilacs, its hawthorns, its cornflowers, its poppies, its apple-trees, the Guermantes way with its river full of tadpoles, its water-lilies and its buttercups, constituted for me for all time the image of the landscape in which I should like to live

When I reflected that their trees—pear-trees, apple-trees, tamarisks—would outlive me, I seemed to be receiving from them a silent counsel to set myself to work at last, before the hour of eternal rest had yet struck.

"That is why life is so horrible, since nobody can understand anybody else," Mme de Guermantes concluded

Revisited Ryan Ruby ‘s stunning Proust essay. Yes.

we are not free to refrain from forging the chains of our own misery

But happiness can never be achieved. If we succeed in overcoming the force of circumstances, nature at once shifts the battle-ground, placing it within ourselves, and effects a gradual change in our hearts until they desire something other than what they are about to possess.

you claim that as a small child you fell in love with me (whereas I assure you in all truthfulness it was I who was in love with you)

I spent my time running from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect on a single canvas the intermittent, antipodean fragments of my fine, scarlet, ever-changing morning