Quote

When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain.

Marcel Proust

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Things
Smell
Remain
Taste
Broken
Food
Past
Subsists
Nothing
Scattered
Long
Distant

More quotes by Marcel Proust

Image
For a long time I would go to bed early. [Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.]
Marcel Proust
Image
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.
Marcel Proust
Image
In love, happiness is an abnormal state.
Marcel Proust
Image
After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's Pensées in an advertisement for soap.
Marcel Proust
Image
I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.
Marcel Proust
Image
Even the simple act that we call going to visit a person of our acquaintance is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.
Marcel Proust
Image
The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.
Marcel Proust
Image
In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.
Marcel Proust
Image
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
Marcel Proust
Image
If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.
Marcel Proust
Image
Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.
Marcel Proust
Image
It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.
Marcel Proust
Image
... in love, barriers cannot be destroyed from the outside by the one to whom the cause despair, no matter what he does and it isonly when he is no longer concerned with them that, suddenly, as a result of work coming from elsewhere, accomplished within the one who did not love him, these barriers, formerly attacked without success, fall futilely.
Marcel Proust
Image
We believe we can change things according to our wishes because that's the only happy solution we can see. We don't think of what usually happens and what is also a happy solution things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.
Marcel Proust
Image
Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.
Marcel Proust
Image
For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.
Marcel Proust
Image
I should have been happy: I wasn’t.
Marcel Proust
Image
The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.
Marcel Proust
Image
We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorours and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent, and intimate hours.
Marcel Proust
Image
The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
Marcel Proust