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We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

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
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Ideas
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Pack
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Already
Principal

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A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.
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No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.
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To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion
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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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We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.
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We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.
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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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Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.
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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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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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Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
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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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An hour or so later he received a note from Odette. Swann had left his cigarette case at her house. If only, she wrote, you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have it back.
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There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.
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In love, happiness is an abnormal state.
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La me decine a fait quelques petits progre' s dans ses connaissances depuis Molie' re, mais aucun dans son vocabulaire. Medicine has made a few, small advances in knowledge since Molie' r e, but none in its vocabulary.
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Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
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Like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern.
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I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me.
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She was a woman of uncertain age.
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