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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

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

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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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A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.
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My dear Madame, I just noticed that I forgot my cane at your house yesterday please be good enough to give it to the bearer of this letter. P.S. Kindly pardon me for disturbing you I just found my cane.
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Similarly the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is most brilliant, or their culture broadest, but those who have had the power, ceasing in a moment to live only for themselves, to make use of their personality as of a mirror.
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Desire makes everything blossom possession makes everything wither and fade.
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As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.
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Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.
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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.
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Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
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If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.
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For although we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble (even the most solid among them) and that fame is transitory, the manner in which—by means of a sort of snapshot—we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it.
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Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.
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People who laugh so heartily at what they themselves have said, when it is not funny, dispense us accordingly, by taking upon themselves the responsibility for the mirth, from joining in it.
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