Jean Santeuil Quotes

“Winter was come indeed bringing with it those pleasures of which the summer dreamer knows nothing—the delight when the fine and glittering day shows in the window, though one knows how cold it is outside; the delight of getting as close as possible to the blazing range which in the shadowy kitchen throws reflections very different from the pale gleams of sunlight in the yard, the range we cannot take with us on our walk, busy with its own activity, growling and grumbling as it sets to work, for in three hours time luncheon must be ready; the delight of filling one's bowl with steaming café-au-lait—for it is only eight o'clock—and swallowing it in boiling gulps while servants at their tasks come in and out with a, 'Good morning: up early, aren't you?' and a kindly, 'It's snug enough in here, but cold outside,' accompanying the words with that smile which is to be seen only on the faces of those who for the moment are thinking of others and not of themselves, whose expressions, entirely freed from egotism, take on a quality of vacillating goodness, a smile which completes that earlier smile of the bright golden sky touching the window-panes, and crowns our every pleasure as we stand there with the lovely heat of the range at our backs, the hot and limpid flavour of the café-au-lait in our mouths; the delight of night-time when, having had to get up to go shiveringly to the icy lavatory in the tower, into which the air creeps through the ill-fitting window, we later return deliciously to our room, feeling a smile of happiness distend our lips, finding it hard not to jump for sheer joy at the thought of the big bed already warm with our warmth, of the still burning fire, the hot-water bottle, the coverlets and blankets which have imparted their heat to the bed into which we are about to slip, walled in, embattled, hiding ourselves to the chin as against enemies thundering at the gates, who will not (and the thought brings gaiety) get the better of us, since they do not even know where we have so snugly gone to earth, laughing at the wind which is roaring outside, climbing up all the chimneys to every floor of the great house, conducting a search on each landing, trying all the locks: the delight of rolling ourselves in the blankets when we feel its icy breath approaching, sliding a little farther down the bed, gripping the hot-water bottle between our feet, working it up too high, and when we push it down again feeling the place where it has been still hot, pulling up the bedclothes to our faces, rolling ourselves into a ball, turning over, thinking—'How good life is!' too gay even to feel melancholy at the thought of the triviality of all this pleasure.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“For a young man has strong imagination but poor judgment, so that he imagines others to be as big as he is but considers himself to be very small. He has unbounded trust in the universe but is constantly unsure of himself.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“He imagined himself lying there, unable to sleep, thinking of his mother, separated from her by the unresponsive blankets tucked too tightly round him, feeling the ceaseless thumping of his heart in the silence of the night, the irrevocability of absence, the rigid stillness of repose, the agony of solitude and sleeplessness. If the room was a prison, the bed was a tomb.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“Even his mother, his own mother, had once accused him of being a snob.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“When Jean and his mother left Etreuilles, Monsieur Sureau had gathered for them great boxfuls of hawthorn and of snowballs which Madame Santeuil had not the courage to refuse. But, as soon as Jean's uncle had gone home, she threw them away, saying that they already had more than enough in the way of luggage. And then Jean cried because he had been separated from the darling creatures which he would have liked to take with him to Paris, and because of his mother's naughtiness.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“The wretchedness of ordinary life, endured so gaily when it is part of our normal existence, is made far worse when it comes as something new, and is exaggerated by the working of the imagination.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“The woods, the vines, the very stones, were at one with the brightness of the sun and the unblemished sky, and even when the sky grew overcast, the multitude of leaves, as in a sudden change of tone, the earth of the roads, the roofs of the town, seemed as though caught up in the unity of a brand-new world. And all that Jean was feeling seemed without effort to chime with the surrounding oneness, and he was conscious of the perfect joy which is the gift of harmony.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“It is said that nothing in our lives is ever lost, that nothing can prevent its having been. That is why, so very often the weight of the past lies ineluctably upon the present. But that is why it is so real in memory, so wholly itself, so far beyond replacement.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“There is, following an ample meal, a sort of pause in time, filled with a gentle slackening of thought and energy, when to sit doing nothing gives us a sense of life's richness and a feeling that the least effort would be intolerable. The melancholy we took with us to table has disappeared and, if we think of it at all it is only to smile, as at some black mood now past, its cause having gone. And with the melancholy, all scruple, all remorse departs from us.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“Love teaches us much, but also it much corrupts us.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“It was not that Madame Santeuil's moral values had altered, but only her view of the moral values of others.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“We trust in love as we trust in life, without thinking of the underlying emptiness, without too much believing in it. We go on loving because we are starving for affection. We want to enjoy its sustenance, and leave it at that. Thus we begin again not once but many times.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“Much that for us is fraught with with happiness or misery, remains almost unnoticed by the rest of the world.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“Jean's desires, like those of all men in love, were concentrated on the impossible.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“When we are nice to others, we generally lose all claim to their respect.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“We are delighted when a Minister awards us a decoration, even when we have no claim to be thus honoured, but if he follows this up by awarding the same distinction to others who occupy a position similar to our own, we feel inclined to keep him, if we can, from so foolishly cheapening the mark of esteem which he has bestowed upon us.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“Without inquiring too deeply into the causes which make it possible to find subjects of gaiety always close at hand, the proof of that possibility can be found in the fact that persons of sensitive intelligence are capable of finding comic potentialities in everything and everybody, thereby demonstrating that if some people hold the belief that there is very little that is laughable in the world, the reason is that they lack the ability to find it.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“Whatever one may say, writing a novel is a very different thing from living one. All the same our lives are not wholly separated from our works. All the scenes that I have narrated here, I have lived through. How then can they be of less value in real life than in a book? The answer to that question is that while I was living them, I was doing so consciously, deliberately: I saw them as productive of pleasure or fear, of vanity or of malice. Their true, their inner essence escaped me. It would have escaped me just the same, no matter how hard I stared at them.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“The glutton usually realizes that gout is ever ready to pounce, and that alcohol is bad for him. But possible disaster weighs light in the scale against certain pleasure.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“Then his tears came once more, and feeling cold he went into his dressing-room to look for something to throw around his shoulders. But he had lost control of his hand so that it moved like a brainless creature and completely failed to carry out the small mathematical operation which consisted, because the inside of the wardrobe was dark, in fumbling a way through the different velvets, silks and satins of his mother's outmoded dresses which, since she had given up wearing them, for many years, she had put away in this piece of furniture, until it could feel the wooden jamb, far back, which separated these garments from his own, and, on reaching the second rough-surfaced coat, to take it from the hanger from which it depended. Instead, it tore down the first piece of fabric it encountered. This happened to be a black velvet coat, trimmed with braid, and lined with cherry-coloured satin and ermine, which, mauled by the violence of his attack, he pulled into the room like a young maiden whom a conqueror has seized and dragged behind him by the hair. In just such a way did Jean now brandish it, but even before his eyes had sent their message to his brain, he was aware of an indefinable fragrance in the velvet, a fragrance that had greeted him when, at ten years old, he had run to kiss his mother—in those days still young, still brilliant and still happy—when she was all dressed up and ready to go out, and flung his arms about her waist, the velvet crushed within his hand, the braid tickling his cheeks, while his lips, pressed to her forehead, breathed in the glittering sense of all the happiness she seemed to hold in keeping for him.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“All the while that Jean was listening to him, he was vaguely conscious that what gives literature its reality is the result of work accomplished by the human spirit, no matter what the material facts that may have stimulated it (a walk, a night of love, a social drama), of a sort of discovery in the world of the spirit, of the emotions, made by the human intelligence, so that the value of a book is never in the material presented by the writer, but in the nature of the operation he performs upon it.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“Monsieur Beulier never engaged in thought except to speak the truth, and never spoke except to express his thought.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“And so it is with things that we shall later love the most. We meet them first as strangers who give us only a feeling of surprise.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“Forgive me, Bertrand, for having on that day loved in you a beauty in which your self-esteem could take no pride, which could not in any way determine my affection.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“Jean would be conscious of a curious feeling that he was living simultaneously in the immediate presence of a particular day and in other similar days of long ago.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“Sadness had reigned in undisputed sovereignty over his shadowed childhood.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil