La Prisonnière Quotes

“Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d'aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d'avoir d'autres yeux, de voir l'univers avec les yeux d'un autre, de cent autres, de voir les cent univers que chacun d'eux voit, que chacun d'eux est;”
― Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière

“O ciúme nada mais é muitas vezes do que uma inquieta necessidade de tirania aplicada às coisas do amor.”
― Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière

“Aliás, se o ciúme nos ajuda a descobrir certo pendor para a mentira na mulher que amamos, centuplica ele esse pendor quando a mulher descobre que somos ciumentos. Ela mente (em proporções como nunca nos tinha mentido antes), ou por pena, ou por medo, ou se furta instintivamente por uma fuga simétrica às nossas investigações.”
― Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière

“وأدركتُ المجال الذى يصطدم به الحب، إننا نتخيل كموضوع له، كائناً يمكن أن يتمدّد أمامنا، منغلقاً ضمن جسد، يا للحسرة، ان امتداد هذا الكائن إلى كل النقط فى الزمان والمكان هو ما شغله ويشغله. وإن لم نتملك صلته بهذا المكان أو ذاك بهذه الساعة أو تلك، فنحن لا نتملّك الكائن. إلا أننا لا نستطيع لمس كل هذه النقط. لو تم تعيينها لنا فقط، لربما وجدنا وسيلة للوصول إليها، إلا أننا نتلمس الطريق إليها ولا نجدها. من هنا الشك والغيرة والمضايقات. إننا نبدد وقتاً ثميناً فى البحث عن أدلة غير معقولة، ونمر بجانب الحقيقة من دون أن ندرك وجودها”
― Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière

“Love is space and time made apprehensible to the heart.”
― Marcel Proust, The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5

“A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.”
― Marcel Proust, The Captive

“I am not working for posterity, M. de Charlus replied, I am content with life, it is quite interesting enough, as poor Swann used to say.”
― Marcel Proust, The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5

“In saying this, M. de Charlus was conforming, perhaps unintentionally, to the universal rule which says that we never give information to the jealous, whether out of an absurd wish to show that we are, out of decency and even if we detest her personally, “on the side” of the suspected one; or from spite toward her, guessing that jealousy will only redouble his love for her; or out of that need to be unpleasant to others which takes the form of telling the truth to almost everyone but hiding it from the jealous, since not knowing will multiply their sufferings, or so they think; while, in order to hurt people, we head straight for what they themselves, perhaps wrongly, imagine to be the most painful subjects.”
― Marcel Proust, The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5

“The impression conveyed by these phrases of Vinteuil’s was different from any other, as if, in spite of the conclusions which science seems to be reaching, individuals did exist. And it was just when he was doing his utmost to be novel, that one could recognize, beneath the apparent differences, the deep similarities and the planned resemblances that underlay a work, when Vinteuil would pick up a given phrase several times, diversify it, playfully change its rhythm, bring it back again in the original form; this kind of deliberate echo, the product of intelligence, inevitably superficial, could never be so striking as the hidden, involuntary resemblances which sprang to the surface, under different colors, between the two distinct masterpieces; for then Vinteuil, striving powerfully to produce something new, searched into himself, and with all the force of creative effort touched his own essence, at a depth where, whatever question one asks, the soul replies with the same accent—its own. A particular accent, this accent of Vinteuil’s, separated from the accent of other musicians by a distinction much more marked than the one we perceive between the voices of different people, or even between the bellowing and the cry of two animal species; a real difference, the one that existed between the thought of some other musician and the eternal investigations of Vinteuil, the question that he put to himself in so many different forms, his speculation, endlessly painstaking but as free from the analytical forms of reasoning as if it had been conducted in the realm of the angels, so that we can measure its depth but no more translate it into human speech than disembodied spirits can when they are called up by a medium and interrogated about the secrets of death; his own accent, for in the end and even taking into account the acquired originality which had struck me in the afternoon, the family relationship which musicologists could trace between composers, it is to a single, personal voice that those great singers, the original musicians, always return in spite of themselves, a voice which is the living proof of the irreducible individuality of each soul.”
― Marcel Proust, The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5

“It is one of the most dreadful things for the lover that, while particular facts—which only the test of experience, or even spying, can verify from among so many possibilities—are so difficult to unearth, the truth, on the other hand, is so easy to discover or simply to intuit.”
― Marcel Proust, The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5

“This was all the more dangerous in that my nature has always made me more open to the world of the possible than to that of real-life contingencies. This approach helps one to understand the human soul, but one runs the risk of being deceived by individuals.”
― Marcel Proust, The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5

“I raised my eyes to those flavescent, frizzy locks and felt myself caught in their swirl and swept away, with a throbbing heart, amid the lightning and the blasts of a hurricane of beauty.”
― Marcel Proust, The Captive

“As for Morel”
― Marcel Proust, The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5

“Of course any treatment”
― Marcel Proust, The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5

“Wij leefden een leven bij de dag dat, hoe moeizaam ook, draaglijk bleef, laag bij de grond gehouden door de ballast der gewoonte en door de zekerheid dat de dag van morgen, bitter als hij mocht zijn, de aanwezigheid zou inhouden van het wezen om wie men geeft.”
― Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière