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Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

Marcel Proust

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Marcel Proust
Age: 51 †
Born: 1871
Born: July 10
Died: 1922
Died: November 18
Author
Essayist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Writer
Paris
France
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
Proust
Valentin-Louis-Georgs-Eugène-Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugéne Marcel Proust
Valentin-Louis-Georges-Eugéne-Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugene Marcel Proust
Valentin-Louis-Georges-Eugene-Marcel Proust
Bernard d'Algouvres
Valentin-Louis-Georges-Eugène-Marcel Proust
Would
Reading
Finds
Makes
Instruments
Book
Merely
Without
Reader
Work
Perhaps
Every
Writer
Optical
Kind
Seen
Discern
Never
Possible
Instrument

More quotes by Marcel Proust

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... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility of a woman whom we have not chosen for her intelligence, but whom we cannot stop ourselves from loving.
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There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.
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There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.
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In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.
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Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.
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We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.
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Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would pass white as a cloud, furtive, lusterless, like an actress who does not have to perform yet and who, from the audience, in street clothes, watches the other actors for a moment, making herself inconspicuous, not wanting anyone to pay attention to her.
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In love, happiness is an abnormal state.
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Love...., ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.
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On ne re c° oit pas la sagesse, il faut la de couvrir soi-me me, apre' s un trajet que personne ne peut faire pour nous, ne peut nous e pargner. We do not receive wisdom.We must discover it ourselves after experiences which no one else can have for us and from which no one else can spare us.
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Daughters of the attitude that produced them, certain women will not appeal to us without the double bed in which we find peace by their side, while others, to be caressed with a more secret intention, require leaves blown by the wind, water rippling in the dark, things as light and fleeting as they are.
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The most powerful soporific is sleep itself.
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I do my intellectual work inside myself, and once I am with my fellow creatures it is more or less a matter of indifference to me whether or not they are intelligent as long as they are kind, sincere, etc.
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Certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.
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The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage.
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For a long time I would go to bed early. [Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.]
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We see things but we don't see them, like things that slid through the mind, one flowing into another.
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For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one no longer is.
Marcel Proust
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Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
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Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.
Marcel Proust