Quote

We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her.

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
Come
Dead
Construct
Ready
Constructs
Within
Intended
Lives
Prisoner
Doe
Walls
Persons
Length
Person
Receive
Presently
Live
Wall
Prisoners

More quotes by Marcel Proust

Image
The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.
Marcel Proust
Image
The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.
Marcel Proust
Image
The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
Marcel Proust
Image
Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.
Marcel Proust
Image
A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain
Marcel Proust
Image
It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.
Marcel Proust
Image
We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry.
Marcel Proust
Image
No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Everything that seemed to fill them full for others we pushed aside, because it stood between us and the pleasures of the Gods.
Marcel Proust
Image
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
Marcel Proust
Image
Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
Marcel Proust
Image
Even though our lives wander, our memories remain in one place.
Marcel Proust
Image
The heart changes...but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.
Marcel Proust
Image
The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.
Marcel Proust
Image
Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.
Marcel Proust
Image
One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.
Marcel Proust
Image
Le veritable voyage de decouverte ne consiste pas a chercher de nouveaux paysages, mais a avoir de nouveaux yeux. (The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.)
Marcel Proust
Image
She was a woman of uncertain age.
Marcel Proust
Image
I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me.
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
For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life.
Marcel Proust