"I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence..."
— Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove)

""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 (Swann's Way)

"...with Mme. de Guermantes things always resolved themselves into luncheons."
— Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time: Volume III: the Guermantes Way)

"You're as strong as the Pont Neuf. You'll live to bury us all!"
— Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time: Volume III: the Guermantes Way)

"...because he knew that for other people their own social obligations took precedence of the death of a
friend, and could put himself in her place by dint of his instinctive
politeness."
— Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time: Volume III: the Guermantes Way)

"The variations of the Duchess's judgment spared no one, except her
husband. He alone had never been in love with her, in him she had
always felt an iron character, indifferent to the caprices that she
displayed, contemptuous of her beauty, violent, of a will that would
never bend, the sort under which alone nervous people can find
tranquillity."
— Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time: Volume III: the Guermantes Way)

" 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

"The variations of the Duchess's judgment spared no one, except her
husband. He alone had never been in love with her, in him she had
always felt an iron character, indifferent to the caprices that she
displayed, contemptuous of her beauty, violent, of a will that would
never bend, the sort under which alone nervous people can find
tranquillity."
— Marcel Proust