Marcel Proust Books Quotes & Sayings

They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there. — Marcel Proust

These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or perhaps that some malady of the brain was hindering its development. — Marcel Proust

... it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were readers of themselves, my book being a sort of magnifying glass ... by which I could give them the means to read within themselves. — Marcel Proust

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

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

The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. — Marcel Proust

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude. — Marcel Proust

And more even than the painter, the writer, in order to achieve volume and substance, in order to attain to generality and, so far as literature can, to reality, needs to have seen many churches in order to paint one church and for the portrayal of a single sentiment requires many individuals. For if art is long and life is short, we may on the other hand say that, if inspiration is short, the sentiments which it has to portray are not of much longer duration. It is our passions which draw the outline of our books, the ensuing intervals of repose which write them. — Marcel Proust

And my grandmother had bought them in preference to other books, just as she would have preferred to take a house that had a gothic dovecot, or some other such piece of antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on the mind, filling it with a nostalgic longing for impossible journeys through the realms of time. — Marcel Proust

A well-read man will yawn with boredom when one speaks to him of a new "good book," as he imagines a sort of composite of all the good books he has read, whereas a good book is something special, unforeseeable, made up not of the sum of all previous masterpieces but of something which the most thorough assimilation of every one of them would not enable him to discover, since it exists not in their sum but beyond it. — Marcel Proust

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. — Marcel Proust

As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realize only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body. — Marcel Proust

We made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility of a woman whom we have not chosen for her intelligence, but whom we cannot stop ourselves from loving. — Marcel Proust

ideas whose inaccuracy was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were derived not from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct, unbroken, oral, degraded, unrecognisable, and alive. — Marcel Proust

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals. — Marcel Proust

A book is like a large cemetery upon whose tombs one can no longer read the effaced names. On the other hand, sometimes one remembers well the name, without knowing if anything of the being, whose name it was, survives in these pages. — Marcel Proust

And yet one did not find in the speech of Bergotte a certain luminosity which in his books, as in those of some other writers, often modified in the written phrase the appearance of its words. This was doubtless because that light issues from so profound a depth that its rays do not penetrate to our spoken words in the hours in which, thrown open to others by the act of conversation, we are to a certain extent closed against ourselves. — Marcel Proust

Ah! there is a man who justifies the wit who insisted that one ought never to know an author except through his books. — Marcel Proust

To understand a profound thought is to have, at the moment one understands it, a profound thought oneself; and this demands some effort, a genuine descent to the heart of oneself ... Only desire and love give us the strength to make this effort. The only books that we truly absorb are those we read with real appetite, after having worked hard to get them, so great had been our need of them. — Marcel Proust

Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company. — Marcel Proust

M. Proust was more severe than M. de Caillavet on Anatole France: "He was selfish and supercilious. He had read so much that he had left his heart in other people's books, and all that remained was dryness. One day I asked him how he came to know so much. He said, 'Not by being such a handsome young man as you. I wasn't in demand, and instead of going out I studied and learned'. — Celeste Albaret

Real books should be the offspring not of daylight and casual talk but of darkness and silence — Marcel Proust

This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered. — Marcel Proust

On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book. — Marcel Proust

Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language. — Marcel Proust

In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be. — Marcel Proust

They buried him, but all through the night of mourning, in the lighted windows, his books arranged three by three kept watch like angels with outspread wings and seemed for him who was no more; the symbol of his resurrection — 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

This dim coolness of my room was to the broad daylight of the street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say equally luminous, and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed only piecemeal; and so it was quite in harmony with my state of repose which (thanks to the enlivening adventures related in my books) sustained, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity. — Marcel Proust

Days in the past cover up little by little those that preceded them and are themselves buried beneath those that follow them. But each past day has remained deposited in us, as in a vast library where, even of the oldest books, there is a copy which doubtless nobody will ever ask to see. And yet should this day from the past, traversing the translucency of the intervening epochs, rise to the surface and spread itself inside us until it covers us entirely, then for a moment names resume their former meaning, people their former aspect, we ourselves our state of mind at the time, and we feel, with a vague suffering which however is endurable and will not last for long, the problems which have long ago become insoluble and which caused us such anguish at the time ... Incessant upheavals raise to the surface ancient deposits. — Marcel Proust

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book. — Marcel Proust

She would make me tell her, too, all about the poems that I meant to compose. And these dreams reminded me that, since I wished, some day, to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. — Marcel Proust