Marcel's Famous Quotes & Sayings
100 Marcel's Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
Yoko Ono is someone who's music I've discovered more recently. The current cd rereleases of her albums all had bonus tracks recorded just with a tape recorder and I'm really into these at the moment because they have a great intimate feel.— Marcel Dzama
A page of a book is like a human face. Look at a page by Hemingway and compare it with Sterne and Marcel Proust. They are different typographical beings. But force upon them those ragged edges, and the influence of the author's style on the physical aspect of the page, their typographical physiognomy will disappear. No, unjustified setting is a sort of gleichschaltung [enforced conformity] through diversity, a very phoney diversity. Produced methodically by chance. For the comfort of the keyboard, and not for the comfort of the eye.— Stefan Themerson
At the start of a new love as its ending, we are not exclusively attached to the object of that love, but rather the desire to love from which it will presently arise (and, later on, the memory it leaves behind) wanders voluptuously through a zone of interchangeable charms— Marcel Proust
simply natural charms, it may be, gratification of appetite, enjoyment of one's surroundings
which are harmonious enough for it not to feel at a loss in the presence of any one of them.
When you do a rewrite, it's really about serving the director's vision, and what the director needs to go into that script.— Kelly Marcel
Or she would look at him with a sullen expression, once again he would see before him a face worthy of figuring in Botticelli's Life of Moses, he would place her in it, he would give her neck the necessary inclination; and when he had well and truly painted her in distemper, in the fifteenth century, on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, the idea that she had nevertheless remained here, by the piano, in the present moment, ready to be kissed and possessed, the idea of her materiality and her life would intoxicate him with such force that, his eyes distracted, his jaw tensed as though to devour her, he would swoop down upon that Botticelli virgin and begin pinching her cheeks.— Marcel Proust
All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.— Marcel Proust
I like living, breathing better than working ... my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant euphoria.— Marcel Duchamp
One is never 100 per cent motivated. In winter, when it's raining and you have to go and play a small team in the north, I won't reveal what passes through your mind when you're getting out of the bus.— Marcel Desailly
But one never finds a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer's leap in the air quite as high as one has been expecting;— Marcel Proust
But the whole idea of the transformation ... mystery, transformation, and manipulations - those were the things that Marcel was a magician at. That's his magic.— Robert Barnes
The young woman's smiling lips met his caresses halfway, and her eyes shone in their depths like pools warmed by the sun.— Marcel Proust
It was that evening, when my mother abdicated her authority, that marked the beginning, along with the slow death of my grandmother, of the decline of my will and of my health. Everything had been decided at the moment when, unable to bear the idea of waiting until the next day to set my lips on my mother's face, I had made my resolution, jumped out of bed, and gone, in my nightshirt, to stay by the window through which the moonlight came, until I heard M. Swann go. My parents having gone with him, I heard the garden gate open, the bell ring, the gate close again ...— Marcel Proust
So in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.— Marcel Proust
It was not only Odette's indifference, however, that he must take pains to circumvent; it was also, not infrequently, his own; feeling that, since Odette had had every facility for seeing him, she seemed no longer to have very much to say to him when they did meet, he was afraid lest the manner - at once trivial, monotonous, and seemingly unalterable - which she now adopted when they were together should ultimately destroy in him that romantic hope, that a day might come when she would make avowal of her passion, by which hope alone he had become and would remain her lover.— Marcel Proust
Do you imagine that the poisonous spittle of five hundred little men of your sort, hoisted on to each other's shoulders, could even drool down on to the tips of my august toes?— Marcel Proust
Faced with the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as the world's first natural philosophers must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, before their science had been elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown. Or, worse still, we are like a person in whose mind the law of causality barely exists, a person who would be incapable, therefore, of establishing a connexion between one phenomenon and another and to whose eyes the spectacle of the world would appear as unstable as a dream.— Marcel Proust
So long as I know what's boiling in my pot I don't bother my head about what's in other people's.— Marcel Proust
It's true, of course, humor is very important in my life, as you know. That's the only reason for living, in fact.— Marcel Duchamp
It appeared that the deference which, on my grandmother's authority, we owed to Mme. de Villeparisis imposed on her the reciprocal obligation to do nothing that would render her less worthy of our regard, and that she had failed in her duty in becoming aware of Swann's existence and in allowing members of her family to associate with him. "How should she know Swann? A lady who, you always made out, was related to Marshal Mac-Mahon!— Marcel Proust
Asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare's Dream) at transforming my humble chamberpot into a bower of aromatic perfume.— Marcel Proust
It was with an unusual intensity of pleasure, a pleasure destined to have a lasting effect on him, that Swann remarked Odette's resemblance to the Zipporah of that Alessandro de Mariano to whom more people willingly give his popular surname, Botticelli, now that it suggests not so much the actual work of the Master as that false and banal conception of it which has of late obtained common currency.— Marcel Proust
There's no solution, because there's no problem— Marcel Duchamp
I thought nothing at all, but I felt an immense sadness, as when two parts of one's past existence, which have been anchored near to one, and upon which one has perhaps been basing idly from day to day an unacknowledged hope, remove themselves finally, with a joyous flapping of pennants, for unknown destinations, like a pair of ships. As— Marcel Proust
No doubt my books too, like my mortal being, would eventually die, one day. But one has to resign oneself to dying. One accepts the thought that in ten years oneself, in a hundred years one's books, will not exist. Eternal duration is no more promised to books than it is to men.— Marcel Proust
I have designed my style pantomimes as white ink drawings on black backgrounds, so that man's destiny appears as a thread lost in an endless labyrinth. I have tried to shed some gleams of light on the shadow of man startled by his anguish.— Marcel Marceau
These new words were heard by my love; they persuaded it that the next day would not be different from what all the other days had been; that Gilberte's feeling for me, already too old to be able to change, was indifference; that in my friendship with Gilberte, I was the only one who loved. "It's true," my love answered, "there's nothing more to be done with this friendship, it won't change." And so, the very next day (or waiting for a public holiday if there was one coming up soon, or an anniversary, or the New Year perhaps, one of those days which are not like the others, when time makes a fresh start by rejecting the heritage of the past, by not accepting the legacy of its sorrows) I would ask Gilberte to give up our old friendship and lay the foundations of a new one.— Marcel Proust
In reality, every reader when he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader's recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth— Marcel Proust
Recalling, some time later, what I had felt at the time, I distinguished the impression of having been held for a moment in her mouth, myself, naked, without any of the social attributes which belonged equally to her other playmates and, when she used my surname, to my parents, accessories of which her lips - by the effort she made, a little after her father's manner, to articulate the words to which she wished to give a special emphasis - had the air of stripping, of divesting me, like the skin from a fruit of which one can swallow only the pulp, while her glance, adapting itself to the same new degree of intimacy as her speech, fell on me also more directly and testified to the consciousness, the pleasure, even the gratitude that it felt by accompanying itself with a smile.— Marcel Proust
It seems that certain transcendental realities emit rays to which the masses are sensitive. That is how, for example, when an event takes place, when at the front an army is in danger, or defeated, or victorious, the rather obscure news which the cultivated man does not quite understand, excite in the masses an emotion which surprises him and in which, once the experts have informed him of the actual military situation, he recognizes the populace's perception of that "aura" surrounding great events and visible for hundreds of kilometers.— Marcel Proust
For regret, like desire, seeks not to analyse but to gratify itself. When one begins to love, one spends one's time, not in getting to know what one's love really is, but in arranging for tomorrow's rendezvous.— Marcel Proust
There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.— Marcel Proust
Thus he went on growing steadily colder, a tiny planet offering a prophetic image of the greater, when gradually heat will withdraw from the earth, then life itself. Then the resurrection will have come to an end, for, however far forward into future generations the works of men may shine, there must none the less be men. If certain species hold out longer against the invading cold, when there are no longer any men, and if we suppose Bergotte's fame to have lasted until then, suddenly it will be extinguished for all time. It will not be the last animals that will read him, for it is scarcely probable that, like the Apostles at Pentecost, they will be able to understand the speech of the various races of mankind without having learned it.— Marcel Proust
Mme Verdurin asked him: "Did you have some of my orangeade?" Whereupon M. de Charlus, with a gracious smile, in a crystalline tone which he rarely adopted, and with endless simperings and wrigglings of the hips, replied: "No, I preferred its neighbour, which is strawberry-juice, I think. It's delicious."[ ... ]But on hearing M. de Charlus say, in that shrill voice and with that smile and those gestures, "No, I preferred its neighbour, the strawberry-juice," one could say: "Ah, he likes the stronger sex,"[ ... ]— Marcel Proust
"In France," Marcel said with wintry dignity, "accidents occur in the bedroom, not the kitchen."— S.J Perelman
Soon, what was tedious was everything. 'Beautiful things, they're so tedious! Paintings, they're enough to drive you mad ... How right you are, it's so tedious, writing letters!' In the end it was life itself that she declared to us was a bore, without one quite knowing from where she was taking her term of comparison.— Marcel Proust
Not caring for their lives' is it?— Marcel Proust
Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.
When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.— Marcel Proust
In Swann's mind, however, these words, meeting no opposition, settled and hardened until they assumed the indestructibility of a truth so indubitable that, if some friend happened to tell him that he had come by the same train and had not seen Odette, Swann would have been convinced that it was his friend who had made a mistake as to the day or hour, since his version did not agree with the words uttered by Odette. These words had never appeared to him false except when, before hearing them, he had suspected that they were going to be. For him to believe that she was lying, and anticipatory suspicion was indispensable.— Marcel Proust
It is curious to note how fragile the memory is, even for the important times in one's life. This is, moreover, what explains the fortunate fantasy of history.— Marcel Duchamp
In today's world, when many of yesterday's fashionable habits are today's misdemeanors, we should rejoice that a chocolate dessert can bring so much innocent pleasure.— Marcel Desaulniers
In that way Vinteuil's phrase, like some theme, say, in Tristan, which represents to us also a certain acquisition of sentiment, has espoused our mortal state, had endued a vesture of humanity that was affecting enough. Its destiny was linked, for the future, with that of the human soul, of which it was one of the special, the most distinctive ornaments. Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is without existence; but, if so, we feel that it must be that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either. We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate. And death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain.— Marcel Proust
Those who have played a big part in one's life very rarely disappear from it suddenly for good. They return to it at odd moments ... before leaving it for good.— Marcel Proust
The years have taught me not to wonder too much at the dark things men do. Strange how it is that men never act crueller than when they're fighting for the sake of an idea. We've been killing since Cain over who stands closer to god. It seems to me that cruelty is just in the way of things. You drive yourself mad if you take it all personal. Those who hurt you don't have the power over you they would like. That's why they do what they do. And I'm not going to give them the power now. But it was a cruel thing that they did, and when they had finished hurting me, a splinter of loneliness seemed to break off and stay inside me forever.— Marcel Theroux
When you work to please others you can't succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone's interest.— Marcel Proust
[It's] long been known that making fun of oneself is only a way of taking oneself seriously slightly less crude than others. 97— Marcel Benabou
![Marcel's Sayings By Marcel Benabou: [It's] long been known that making fun of oneself is only a way of taking](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/marcels-sayings-by-marcel-benabou-70276.jpg "Marcel's Sayings By Marcel Benabou: [It's] long been known that making fun of oneself is only a way of taking")
Art is like a shipwreck; it's every man for himself.— Marcel Duchamp
I am against the word 'anti' because it's a little bit like 'atheist,' as compared to 'believer.' And an atheist is just as much of a religious man as the believer is.— Marcel Duchamp
It is the tragedy of other people that they are merely showcases for the very perishable collections of one's own mind.— Marcel Proust
And then I asked myself whether originality did indeed prove that great writers are gods, ruling each over a kingdom that is his alone, or whether there is not an element of sham in it all, whether the differences between one man's books and another's were not the result of their respective labours rather than the expression of a radical and essential difference between diverse personalities.— Marcel Proust
There is nothing like desire for obstructing any resemblance between what one says and what one has on one's mind.— Marcel Proust
One reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one's eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one s mistress.— Marcel Proust
One does not contemplate it like a picture. The idea of contemplation disappears completely. Simply take note that it's a bottle rack, or that it's a bottle rack that has changed its destination ... It's not the visual question of the readymade that counts; it's the fact that it exists, even.— Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp, one of this century's pioneers, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another. There it changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art ... He declared that he wanted to kill art ("for myself") but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought, a "new thought for that object".— Jasper Johns
She can't have understood you: you are so utterly different from ordinary men. That's what I liked about you when I first saw you; I felt at once that you weren't like everybody else.— Marcel Proust
But it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was deep and allowed my mind to relax entirely; then it would let go of the map of the place where I had fallen asleep and, when I woke in the middle of the night, since I did not know where I was, I did not even understand in the first moment who I was; all I had, in its original simplicity, was the sense of existence as it may quiver in the depths of an animal; I was more bereft than a caveman; but then the memory - not yet of the place where I was, but of several of those where I had lived and where I might have been - would come to me like help from on high to pull me out of the void from which I could not have got out on my own; I passed over centuries of civilization in one second, and the image confusedly glimpsed of oil lamps, then of wing-collar shirts, gradually recomposed my self's original features.— Marcel Proust
A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.— Marcel Proust
And, quite possibly, this lack (or seeming lack) of participation by a person's soul in the virtue of which he or she is the agent has, apart from its aesthetic meaning, a reality which, if not strictly psychological, may at least be called psysiognomical. Since then, whenever in the course of my life I have come across, in convents for instance, truly saintly embodiments of practical charity, they have generally had the cheerful, practical, brusque and unemotioned air of a busy surgeon, the sort of face in which one can discern no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, no fear of hurting it, the impassive, unsympathetic, sublime face of true goodness.— Marcel Proust
As though one's life were a series of galleries in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness, the same (so to speak) tonality - this early Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the scent of the great chestnut-tree, of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of tarragon.— Marcel Proust
There is no doubt that a person's charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: 'No, this evening I shan't be free'.— Marcel Proust
Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it's music, not words, that provides power.— Marcel Marceau
Time has a way of evening things out, the simple ways endure, and the fancy pants with his smart new way falls by the roadside. The best way to tell how long a thing will last is ask how long it's been around for. The newest things end soonest. And things that have been around for a good long while will last awhile to come.— Marcel Theroux
Her [Albertine's] intense and velvety gaze fastened itself, glued itself to the passer-by, so adhesive, so corrosive, that you felt that, in withdrawing, it must tear away the skin.— Marcel Proust
![Marcel's Sayings By Marcel Proust: Her [Albertine's] intense and velvety gaze fastened itself, glued itself to the passer-by, so adhesive,](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/marcels-sayings-by-marcel-proust-397537.jpg "Marcel's Sayings By Marcel Proust: Her [Albertine's] intense and velvety gaze fastened itself, glued itself to the passer-by, so adhesive,")
Sadists of Mlle Vinteuil's sort are creatures so purely sentimental, so naturally virtuous, that even sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, the prerogative of the wicked. And when they allow themselves for a moment to enjoy it they endeavour to impersonate, to identify with, the wicked, and to make their partners do likewise, in order to gain the momentary illusion of having escaped beyond the control of their own gentle and scrupulous natures into the inhuman world of pleasure.— Marcel Proust
It's better to choose the culprits than to seek them out.— Marcel Pagnol
His life and family circle changed considerably between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust's brother Robert married and left the family apartment. His father died in September of the same year. Finally, and most crushingly, Proust's beloved mother died in September 1905.— Marcel Proust
Their arrogance protected them against any liking for their fellow-man, against the slightest interest in the strangers sitting all about them, amidst whom M. de Stermaria adopted the manner one has in the buffet-car of a train, grim, hurried, stand-offish, brusque, fastidious and spiteful, surrounded by other passengers whom one has never seen before, whom one will never see again and towards whom the only conceivable way of behaving is to make sure that they keep away from one's cold chicken and stay out of one's chosen corner-seat.— Marcel Proust
I love Koscielny, I've seen him a lot. He has good leg speed, which reminds me of Lilian [Thuram]. The last time we spoke I told him to work hard and he'll become one of the best defenders in the world. He's at the standard of a Vidic or Pique. I mean that sincerely.— Marcel Desailly
Because the erotic frisson is such that the kiss that you only imagine giving,can be as powerful and as enchanting as hours of actual lovemaking. As Marcel Proust said, it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.— Esther Perel
I didn't abandon everything at a moment's notice - on the contrary. I returned to France from America, leaving the 'Large Glass' unfinished.— Marcel Duchamp
The lady in the latrine, Julie DuBois, and I were on our first date after three weeks of shameless flirting. I'm about forty, Julie's about thirty - a PhD in English lit, a professor at American University, learned, tenured, brilliant, blonde, blue-eyed - and, not that it matters, also quite attractive. I had been looking forward to this date for a week; I really wanted to get Julie's take on Marcel Proust's persistent use of subordinate clauses, a literary mystery I can never seem to get out of my mind - and yes, Julie was having trouble believing that, too. But men who date women for their looks alone are pigs.— Brian Haig
I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinancy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.— Marcel Proust
Tradition is the great misleader because it's too easy to follow what has already been done - even though you may think you're giving it a kick. I was really trying to invent, instead of merely expressing myself.— Marcel Duchamp
He would not have believed the suggestion, nor would he have been greatly distressed by the thought that people supposed her to be attached to him, that people felt them , to be united by any ties so binding as those of snobbishness or wealth. But even if he had accepted the possibility, it might not have caused him any suffering to discover that Odette's love for him was based on a foundation more lasting than mere affection, or any attractive qualities which she might have found in him; on a sound, commercial interest; an interest which would postpone for ever the fatal day on which she might be tempted to bring their relations to an end.— Marcel Proust
Swann, with that almost arrogant charity of a man of the world who, amid the dissolution of all his own moral prejudices, finds in another's shame merely a reason for treating him with a friendly benevolence ...— Marcel Proust
She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.— Marcel Proust
Lying is essential to humanity. It plays as large a part perhaps as the quest for pleasure, and is moreover governed by that quest. One lies in order to protect one's pleasure, or one's honour if the disclosure of one's pleasure runs counter to one's honour. One lies all one's life long, even, especially, perhaps only, to those who love one. For they alone make us fear for our pleasure and desire their esteem.— Marcel Proust
Carried away in a sort of dream, he smiled, then he began to hurry back towards the lady; he was walking faster than usual, and his shoulders swayed backwards and forwards, right and left, in the most absurd fashion; altogether he looked, so utterly had he abandoned himself to it, ignoring all other considerations, as though he were the lifeless and wire-pulled puppet of his own happiness.— Marcel Proust
Perhaps my favourite story is 'Le Passe-Muraille' by Marcel Ayme. It's about a guy who wakes up with a weird faculty that means he can walk through walls. He's a very shy clerk, and he uses it to get revenge, or vent his frustration.— Michel Gondry
Indeed, the first thing you might learn, in considering jokes, is that Marcel Duchamp's urinal was one - quite a good one the first time around, corny by mid-twentieth century, and downright stupid today.— Roger Scruton
As the company headed for the table, I drew her over to the window and passionately kissed her face, which had delicately recovered from its past suffering. I was wrong to say that I have never recaptured the sweetness of that kiss at Les Oublis. The kiss on this evening was as sweet as no other. Or rather, it was the kiss of Les Oublis, which, evoked by the allure of a similar minute, slipped gently from the depths of the past and settled between my mother's still vaguely pale cheeks and my lips.— Marcel Proust
You know, also I, you know, I was on those birth control pills and my breasts were like, they hurt ... and, you know, it was like they blew up like. You know, they wouldn't fit into any of my dresses. I had to quit taking those birth control pills ... This was like - I mean they were like, I thought they should be photographed really ... So they were, for immortality. (On being photographed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at Duchamp's 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art.)— Eve Babitz
I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare's 'Dream') at transforming my humble chamber into a bower of aromatic perfume.— Marcel Proust
It's difficult for a company to be anywhere interesting in a world that is so dominated by prototypes and great and bright ideas.— Marcel Wanders
Thus I discovered that if one is the least bit welcoming in one's treatment of it, a word never comes alone. It brings along with it all those that belong to its clan ... 102— Marcel Benabou
This malady which Swann's love had become had so proliferated, was so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so utterly inseparable from him, that it would have been impossible to eradicate it without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his love was no longer operable.— Marcel Proust
She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That's the only way to get really good ones. And they're the rarest of luxuries.— Marcel Proust
Apparently Jamie is great at being soft and hard at the same time. Which is hard to do for an actor! He's going to get an Oscar!— Kelly Marcel
Nor did these society people add to Elstir's work in their mind's eye that temporal perspective which enabled them to like, or at least to look without discomfort at, Chardin's painting. And yet the older among them might have reminded themselves that in the course of their lives they had gradually seen, as the years bore them away from it, the unbridgeable gulf between what they considered a masterpiece by Ingres and what they had supposed must forever remain a "horror" (Manet's Olympia, for example) shrink until the two canvases seemed like twins. But we never learn, because we lack the wisdom to work backwards from the particular to the general, and imagine ourselves always to be faced with an experience which has no precedents in the past.— Marcel Proust
even when a political truth is enshrined in written documents, it is seldom that these have any more value than a radiographic plate on which the layman imagines that the patient's disease is inscribed in so many words, whereas in fact the plate furnishes simply one piece of material for study, to be combined with a number of others on which the doctor's reasoning powers will be brought to bear and on which he will base his diagnosis.— Marcel Proust
Kilmartin wrote a highly amusing and illuminating account of his experience as a Proust revisionist, which appeared in the first issue of Ben Sonnenberg's quarterly Grand Street in the autumn of 1981. The essay opened with a kind of encouragement: 'There used to be a story that discerning Frenchmen preferred to read Marcel Proust in English on the grounds that the prose of A la recherche du temps perdu was deeply un-French and heavily influenced by English writers such as Ruskin.' I cling to this even though Kilmartin thought it to be ridiculous Parisian snobbery; I shall never be able to read Proust in French, and one's opportunities for outfacing Gallic self-regard are relatively scarce.— Christopher Hitchens
Like a fruit hidden among its leaves, which has grown and ripened unobserved by man, until it falls of its own accord, there came upon us one night the kitchen-maid's confinement.— Marcel Proust
To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!— Marcel Proust
as those old engravings of the 'Cenacolo,' or that painting by Gentile Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in which they no longer exist, the masterpiece of Leonardo and the portico of Saint Mark's. We— Marcel Proust
It's a kind of heresy to say so, but I think our race has made forms more beautiful than what was here before us. Sometimes god's handiwork is crude. There is no more ugly thing than a lobster. There's not much pretty about a caribou. It has an ungainly walk and its touchhole voids droppings when it strains in harness. Was there a straight line on earth before we drew one?— Marcel Theroux
How often is not the prospect of future happiness thus sacrificed to one's impatient insistence upon an immediate gratification.— Marcel Proust
I also won one from the emperor of Japan, with a prize for the arts. That's important.— Marcel Carne
I watched Gretzky, I watched Lemieux. Maybe it's the time when you're playing, but for a kid coming into the league, you play the Boston Bruins and you just watched Bobby Orr.— Marcel Dionne
A game of chess is a visual and plastic thing, and if it isn't geometric in the static sense of the word, it is mechanical, since it moves. It's a drawing; it's a mechanical reality.— Marcel Duchamp
One felt that in her renunciation of life she had deliberately abandoned those places in which she might at least have been able to see the man she loved, for others where he had never trod.— Marcel Proust
It's odd how a person always arouses admiration for his moral qualities among the relatives of another with whom he has sexual relations. Physical love, so unjustifiably decried, makes everyone show, down to the least detail, all he has of goodness and self-sacrifice, so that he shines even in the eyes of those nearest to him.— Marcel Proust
