In Search Of Lost Time Best Quotes & Sayings

Our behavior is different. How often have you seen a headline like this?
TWO DIE ATTEMPTING RESCUE OF DROWNING CHILD. If a man gets lost in the mountains, hundreds will search and often two or three searchers are killed. But the next time somebody gets lost just as many volunteers turn out.
Poor arithmetic, but very human. It runs through all our folklore, all human religions, all our literature
a racial conviction that when one human needs rescue, others should not count the price. — Robert A. Heinlein

In the literary machine that Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" constitutes, we are struck by the fact that all the parts are produced as asymmetrical sections, paths that suddenly come to an end, hermetically sealed boxes, noncommunicating vessels, watertight compartments, in which there are gaps even between things that are contiguous, gaps that are affirmations, pieces of a puzzle belonging not to any one puzzle but to many, pieces assembled by forcing them into a certain place where they may or may not belong, their unmatched edges violently forced out of shape, forcibly made to fit together, to interlock, with a number of pieces always left over. — Gilles Deleuze

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

I've known I wanted to do this ever since I was four years old and watched 'Star Search' for the first time. I mean, Harrison Ford in 'Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark?' My hero. — Joey Lawrence

The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We're increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism. — Lev Grossman

There was a period of time when I first moved to Nashville, like the first couple of years, that I was just simply lost. I didn't know who I was; I didn't know really what I was doing here. I was meant to be a singer, but I just felt lost. That's when I went on the search for my birth family. — Faith Hill

When Odette ceased to be for him a creature always absent, longed for, imaginary, when the feeling he had for her was no longer the same mysterious disturbance caused in him by the phrase from the sonata, but affection, gratitude, when normal relations were established between them that would put an end to his madness and his gloom, then no doubt the actions of Odette's daily life would appear to him of little interest in themselves ... (p. 302, In Search of Lost Time Vol. 1 The Way by Swann's, Lydia Davis translation) — Marcel Proust

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. — Marcel Proust

Proust's In Search of Lost Time? — Haruki Murakami

Strangely enough, he didn't feel any guilt for separating himself from his past. Five years ago, he clearly heard in his dream a message brought to him by Archangel Michael from the God Almighty, telling him he should get up and leave everything behind; that his place was not there; that it was time to go in search for his true self and for his true destiny.
Now, five years after, he was sitting in the Bowery chapel, a broken and homeless man, still trying to find that which he was looking for. But he didn't regret anything he had done in those five years. In his mind, it wasn't his doing. He sincerely believed that he surrendered his own will to the will of God and that everything that happened to him, good or bad, had to happen for some reason. It was God's doing. It was his destiny. He just had to figure out why. — Stevan V. Nikolic

He felt as if he hadn't slept because he spent all night wandering through the world looking for a maiden who bore his heart in her womb. His heart grew in her like a child. He was pregnant with his heart for a long time, for a year, for ten years, for a generation, for a hundred and two years. His heart grew bigger and bigger in her, and she grew bigger and bigger to accomodate the growth of his heart in her womb. He never knew when she would give birth to his heart and he lost her and searched the world over and never found her. His father, the king, told him that the world in which he searched for he was his heart, and that she was the mother of all the world, and that his search was over when it began, but he didn't know it. — Ben Okri

For then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself.
Marcel Proust
In Search of Lost Time, 1913 — Marcel Proust

A real person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either. — Marcel Proust

There is a Hindu legend that tells us that there was once a time when all men were gods, but they abused their divinity. Brahma, the god of creation, concluded that people had lost the right to their divinity and decided to take it away from them. Wanting to hide it somewhere where they wouldn't be able to find it, he called a council of all the gods to advise him. Some suggested that they bury it deep in the earth, others that they sink it in the ocean, others still suggested it be placed on top of the highest mountain, but Brahma said that mankind was ingenious and would dig down far into the earth, trawl the deepest oceans and climb every mountain in an effort to find it again. 'The gods were on the point of giving up when Brahma said, "I know where we will hide man's divinity, we will hide it inside him. He will search the whole world but never look inside and find what is already within."' Viola — Kate Atkinson

This compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without result was so cruel that one day, noticing a swelling over his stomach, he felt an actual joy in the idea that he had, perhaps, a tumor that would prove fatal, that he need not concern himself with anything further, since it was this malady that was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the not-distant end. If indeed, at his period, it often happened that, though without admitting it even to himself, he longed for death, it was in order to escape not so much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the monotony of his struggle. — Marcel Proust

You will close your eyes. And listen carefully . . . . You must learn to listen carefully when people talk to you about their death. We each carry our own death within us, and we feel when it is there. — Celeste Albaret

Proust writes, he remembers, physically. He depends on his body to give him the information that will bring him to the past. His book is called 'In Search of Lost Time,' and he does it through the senses. He does it through smell. He does it through feeling. He does it through texture. It is all physically driven, that language. — Twyla Tharp

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

There are ways in, journeys to the center of life, through time; through air, matter, dream and thought. The ways are not always mapped or charted, but sometimes being lost, if there is such a thing, is the sweetest place to be. And always, in this search, a person might find that she is already there, at the center of the world. It may be a broken world, but it is glorious nonetheless. — Linda Hogan

How about Proust's In Search of Lost Time?" Tamaru asked. "If you've never read it this would be a good opportunity to read the whole thing."
"Have you read it?"
"No, I haven't been in jail, or had to hide out for a long time. Someone once said unless you have those kinds of opportunities, you can't read the whole of Proust. — Haruki Murakami

The doors of the darkest room one had ever seen were opened
and everyone was asked to collect the pieces of themselves that they have lost with time all these years. Everyone rushed in and started searching for the pieces that would complete them but all of a sudden they saw the light in the room fading away, they turned around and saw the doors closing back again. They screamed and tried to run back but all of a sudden there were fences all around them, they lost their voice and helplessly stuck in there saw the doors closing. They lost themselves completely in the quest of searching the pieces they had lost before. — Akshay Vasu

I couldn't believe I'd so completely lost track of time, but I'd had monsters to fight, a police interrogation to deal with, a graveyard to search, my dad to send home, a mobster's brother's death to avert, a new job to learn, and an illegal auction to attend. It was a wonder I got anything done, really. — Karen Marie Moning

Suppose you had seven credit cards in your purse or wallet and you lost one. Wouldn't you leave the six and go search for the missing one until you found it? I lost a credit card recently and never once pulled out the one I hadn't lost to obsess over it. I felt no urgency about my un-lost credit card. I didn't call a single person to say that I still had my American Express Card. But I did start calling around to see if anyone had seen my lost MasterCard. When you lose something important, you obsess over it; you get preoccupied with it. It's pretty much all you think about. Remember the last time you couldn't find your phone? — Andy Stanley

Sex parties, alcohol and drugs lost their appeal to Sven after a while. Music never did, in his continual search for that sober connection
intimacy with one person over a long period of time, as opposed to periods of intimacy with a bunch of random faces. — Jess C. Scott

By itself, an ordinary snapshot is no less banal than the petite madeleine in Proust's In Search of Lost Time ... but as goad to memory, it is often the first integer in a sequence of recollections that has the power to deny time for the sake of love. — Michael Lesy

Let's go back to the train station,' she said. 'Or,
rather, let's come back to this room, to the day when we sat here together for the first time
and you recognised that I existed and gave me a gift. That was your first attempt to enter my
soul, and you weren't sure whether or not you were welcome. But, as you say in your story,
human beings were
once divided and now seek the embrace that will reunite them. That is our instinct. But it is
also our reason for putting
up with all the difficulties we meet in that search.I want you to look at me, but I want you to take care
that I don't notice. Initial desire is important because it is hidden, forbidden, not permitted.
You don't know whether you are looking at your lost half or not; she doesn't know either,
but something is drawing you together, and you must believe that it is true you are each
other's other half — Paulo Coelho

Anyone who's read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles. — Lorrie Moore

Nothing, in truth, can ever replace a lost companion. Old comrades cannot be manufactured. There is nothing that can equal the treasure of so many shared memories, so many bad times endured together, so many quarrels, reconciliations, heartfelt impulses. Friendships like that cannot be reconstructed. If you plant an oak, you will hope in vain to sit soon under its shade.
For such is life. We grow rich as we plant through the early years, but then come the years when time undoes our work and cuts down our trees. One by one our comrades deprive us of their shade, and within our mourning we always feel now the secret grief of growing old.
If I search among my memories for those whose taste is lasting, if I write the balance sheet of the moments that truly counted, I surely find those that no fortune could have bought me. You cannot buy the friendship of a companion bound to you forever by ordeals endured together. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

I think that all writing is in search of lost time. I'm starting to realise that very clearly. — Ruth Ozeki

was far too young to be bugged, stalked, and murdered. I had never been to Bora Bora or finished In Search of Lost Time or run naked around the Washington Monument or gone skiing with Karl Lagerfeld. I had so much living to do. — Karin Tanabe