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

A book is no mere book any more than man can be mere man. A book was like an individual man, unmatched and with no cause of existence beyond himself.

— Marcel Proust

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

— Marcel Proust

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

After luncheon the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith, ...

— Marcel Proust

A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the unexpected options that it reveals at one point, the impasse it presents at another, causes deviating extensively from his preconceived plan.

— Marcel Proust

Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May.

— Marcel Proust

All our final resolutions are made in a state of mind which is not going to last.

— Marcel Proust

All the objects which he contemplated with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude, for if, in absorbing his dreams, they had delivered him from an obsession, they themselves were, in turn, enriched by the absorption; they shewed him the palpable realization of his fancies, and they interested his mind; they took shape and grew solid before his eyes, and at the same time they soothed his troubled heart.

— Marcel Proust

All the products of one period have something in common; the artists who illustrate the poetry of their generation are the same artists who are employed by the big financial houses. And nothing reminds me so much of the monthly parts of Notre-Dame de Paris, and of various books by Gérard de Nerval, that used to hang outside the grocer's door at Comb ray, than does, in its rectangular and flowery border, supported by recumbent river-gods, a 'personal share' in the Water Company.

— Marcel Proust