1
After a certain age, and even if we develop in quite different ways, the more we become ourselves, the more our family traits are accentuated.Marcel Proust
2
It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.Marcel Proust
3
The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.Marcel Proust
4
..infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyse mechanisms of which otherwise we should know nothing. A man who falls straight into bed night after night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, I don't say great discoveries, but even minor observations about sleep. He scarcely knows that he is asleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. An unfailing memory is not a very powerful incentive to the study of the phenomena of memory.Marcel Proust
5
For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart.Marcel Proust
6
A man who, night after night, falls like a lump of lead upon his bed, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will such a man ever dream of making, I do not say great discoveries, but even minute observations upon sleep? He barely knows that he does sleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. A memory without fault is not a very powerful incentive to studying the phenomena of memory.Marcel Proust
7
The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome.Marcel Proust
8
We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence.Marcel Proust
9
His [Morel's] nature was really like a sheet of paper that has been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten it out.Marcel Proust
10
In the case of Albertine, I felt that I should never discover anything, that, out of that tangled mass of details of fact and falsehood, I should never unravel the truth: and that it would always be so, unless I were to shut her up in prison (but prisoners escape) until the end.Marcel Proust
11
There is no need, in order to explain three-quarters of the opinions held about people, to go so far as a love that has been spurned or an exclusion from political power. Our judgment remains unsure: an invitation refused or received determines it.Marcel Proust
12
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