#proust

I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place. ↗

— Francoise Sagan

#keeps #place #proust #read #you

Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else. ↗

— Albert Camus

#art #creating #flowers #marcel-proust #wallpaper

Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#imagination #proust #women #beauty

I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#proust #rooms #beauty

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? (Just to give you an idea, Proust's reply was 'To be separated from Mama.') I think that the lowest depth of misery ought to be distinguished from the highest pitch of anguish. In the lower depths come enforced idleness, sexual boredom, and/or impotence. At the highest pitch, the death of a friend or even the fear of the death of a child. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#children #death #fear #friends #idleness

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

#proust #remembrance-of-things-past #swann-s-way #equality

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#literature #memory #proust #faith

Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#memory #time #imagination

I wrote my first novel, McFarlane Boils The Sea, under the influence of Kelman and Proust, which is like drinking a cocktail of Bowmore and Châteauneuf du Pape. (James Meek in interview with TMO) ↗

— James Meek

#marcel-proust #peoples-act-of-love #scottish-writers #love

What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#friends #friendship #life #proust-questionnaire #rushdie