In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends–books–it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: “What did they think of us?”–“ Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?”–“ Did they like us?”–nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading. Marcel Proust
About This Quote

lt is the great charm of books that they can be read when one feels like reading them. When you have a moment of leisure, you can happily submerge yourself in a novel. In the words of Ernest Renan, “The book is a friend that I have not yet met.” This quote captures the feeling that one has when reading a book. It is a friendship that they have not yet met and a friend they have yet to meet. They are able to immerse themselves in the world of make believe for hours on end with no worries about the outside world or any other stresses from life.

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More Quotes By Marcel Proust
  1. Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.
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  3. My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.
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  5. One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.
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