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

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

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A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively upon awaking and in one second reads in them the point of the earth that he occupies, the time past until his arousal but their ranks can be mingled or broken.
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It is up to my spirit to find the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty, each time the spirit feels beyond its own comprehension whenit, the explorer, is altogether to obscure land that it must search and where all its baggage is of no use. To search? That is not all: to create.
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A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed.
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At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.
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Desire makes everything blossom
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Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.
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What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?
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The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.
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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.
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Love...., ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.
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Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.
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I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire.
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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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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.
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Even though our lives wander, our memories remain in one place.
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I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop the potion is losing its magic.
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Habit! that skillful but slow arranger, which starts out by letting our spirit suffer for weeks in a temporary state, but that thespirit is after all happy to discover, for without habit and reduced to its own resources, the spirit would be unable to make any lodgings seem habitable.
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If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.
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The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.
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I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.
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