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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.

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
Life
Strive
Like
Identity
Form
Give
Nilly
Persons
Willy
Person
Copying
Giving
Features
Time
Drawing

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We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.
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People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
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The most powerful soporific is sleep itself.
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Desire makes everything blossom
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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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Photography is the product of complete alienation.
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Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth.
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...a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.
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Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
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Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.
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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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A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.
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Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.
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The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.
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Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones.
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We may have revolved every possible idea in our minds, and yet the truth has never occurred to us, and it is from without, when we are least expecting it, that it gives us its cruel stab and wounds us forever.
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People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.
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The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.
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They like my books better in England than in France a translation would be very successful there.
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She was a woman of uncertain age.
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