La fugitiva Quotes

“Dejemos a las mujeres guapas para los hombres sin imaginación.”
― Marcel Proust, Albertine desaparecida: En busca del tiempo perdido VI

“It is to such sufferings that we attach the pleasure of loving, of delighting in the most insignificant remarks of a woman, which we know to be insignificant, but which we perfume with her scent.”
― Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: The Sweet Cheat Gone

“Le chagrin qui n'est nullement une conclusion pessimiste librement tirée d'un ensemble de circonstances funestes, mais la reviviscence intermittente et involontaire d'une impression spécifique, venue du dehors, et que nous n'avons pas choisie.”
― Marcel Proust, La fugitiva

“We fall in love with a smile, the look in someone’s eyes, a shoulder. That is enough; then during the long hours of hope or sadness, we create a person, we compose a character. And later, when we come to know better the person we love, we can no more, whatever cruel realities confront us, detach this kind disposition, this amorous feminine nature, from the person who has that look, or that shoulder, than we can remove her youth from a woman who has grown older but whom we have known since she was young.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“For Albertine’s death to have suppressed my suffering, the mortal blow would have had to kill her not only in Touraine, but within me. There, she had never been more alive. To enter inside us, people have been obliged to take on the form and to fit into the framework of time; appearing to us only in successive instants, they have never managed to reveal to us more than one aspect, print more than a single photograph of themselves at a time. This is no doubt a great weakness in human beings, to consist in a simple collection of moments; yet a great strength too; they depend on memory, and our memory of a moment is not informed of everything that has happened since, the moment which it registered still lives on and, with it, the person whose form was sketched within it. And then this fragmentation not only makes the dead person live on, it multiplies her forms. In order to console myself, I would have had to forget not one but innumerable Albertines. When I had succeeded in accepting the grief of having lost one of them, I would have to begin again with another, with a hundred others.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“We believe that we may change things around us to suit our desires, we believe this because otherwise we can see no acceptable solution. We do not think of the solution which occurs most frequently and which is also acceptable: when we do not manage to change things to suit our desires, but our desires gradually change. We become indifferent to a situation which we had hoped to change when we found it unbearable.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“The links between another person and ourselves exist only in our minds. Memory weakens them as it fades, and despite the illusions which we hope will deceive us and with which, whether from love, friendship, politeness, human respect or from duty, we hope to deceive others, we exist on our own. Man is a being who cannot move beyond his own boundaries, who knows others only within himself, and if he alleges the contrary, he is lying.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“Il n'y a pas de réussite facile ni d'échecs définitifs.”
― Proust Marcel, La fugitiva

“How much farther does anguish penetrate in psychology than psychology itself!”
― Marcel Proust, The Sweet Cheat Gone

“No es resultado de la casualidad que los hombres intelectuales y sensibles se entreguen siempre a mujeres insensibles e inferiores y les tengan, sin embargo, apego, si la prueba de que no son amados no los cura en absoluto de sacrificarlo todo por conservar junto a ellos a una mujer así”
― Marcel Proust, La fugitiva

“Of the state of mind which, for the whole of that far-off year, had been nothing but endless torture to me, nothing remained. For in this world where everything wears out, where everything perishes, there is one thing that collapses and is more completely destroyed than anything else, and leaves fewer traces than beauty itself: and that is grief.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“And indeed, does death not come between us and women whom we no longer love but meet again years later, just as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that our love no longer exists makes of the women that they used to be, or the men that we were, dead people? Perhaps also she might not have remembered, or she might have lied. In any case I no longer saw any interest in finding out, since my heart had already changed more than Gilberte’s face.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“I remember only too well, since I had only a moment to tell you, given the danger of being seen by your parents and mine, how I showed you so crudely what I wanted that I’m ashamed of it now. But you looked at me so fiercely that I realized that you didn’t want to.” And suddenly I thought that the real Gilberte and the real Albertine were perhaps those who offered themselves up in a single glance, one by a hedgerow of pink hawthorn, the other on the beach. And it was I, unable to understand something which I was to retrieve only later in my memory, after a delay during which the whole emotional undercurrent of my conversation had made them fear to be as frank as they had been in the first instance, who had spoiled everything with my clumsiness. I had “bungled” things more completely with them than Saint-Loup had with Rachel, and for the same reasons, although I have to say that my relative failure with them was less absurd. “And the second time,” continued Gilberte, “was years later when I saw you in your doorway, the day before I met you at my aunt Oriane’s; I didn’t recognize you straight away, or rather I recognized you without realizing it, since I felt the same urges that I had at Tansonville.—But in between, there was the Champs-Elysées.—Yes, but then you were too much in love with me, I felt that you were spying on my every move.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“Once, the first time, by telling me that, “If you weren’t too hungry and it weren’t so late, if we took the path on the left and then turned to the right it would take us less than a quarter of an hour to reach the Guermantes.” It was as if she had said, “Turn left, then turn right, and you will grasp the intangible, you will reach the distant and unattainable goals of which on earth we know only the direction, and only”—something I had always previously thought of as all I could ever know of the Guermantes, and perhaps in a sense I was not entirely wrong—“the ‘way’ toward them.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“The walks we took then were most often the same as those we had taken in earlier days when we were children: now on my way to Guermantes, how could I have avoided experiencing even more strongly than ever the feeling that I would never be capable of writing, added to the realization that my imagination and my sensitivity had weakened, when I saw how little curiosity Combray inspired in me? I was sad to see how little I relived my past years.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“As some need the scent of a forest or the sound of the lapping waters of a lake, I needed to feel her sleeping beside me at night and, during the day, to have her always beside me in the car. For even if we forget a love affair, it may determine the form of the love affair that follows.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“This was, moreover, a period when I saw quite a lot of Gilberte, with whom I had resumed my friendship: for in the long term the rhythm of our lives does not scan with the timescale of our friendships. Once a sufficient period of time has elapsed, we see (just as we see the revival of former ministries in politics or of forgotten plays in the theater) friendly relations resumed, after long years of interruption, between the same people as before, and revived with pleasure. After ten years of reasons for one person to be too much in love, and reasons for the other not to tolerate such despotic demands, the reasons cease to exist. Only affinities matter, and everything that Gilberte would have refused me previously, she easily granted me, no doubt because I no longer desired it.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“We are easily tempted to disdain an ambition which we have failed to fulfill or which we have satisfied and outgrown. And we suppose such disdain inherent even in people whom we did not know at the time. Perhaps if we could go back down the years, we would find these people ravaged, more furiously than anyone, by those same faults which they have managed so completely to hide or overcome that we consider them incapable not only of ever having been affected themselves but even of ever excusing them in others, since we assume that they are unable to imagine them.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“(which was a mistake, for the value of an aristocratic title, like that of a share quoted on the stock exchange, rises when in demand and falls when on offer. Everything we believe imperishable tends toward destruction; a social position, like everything else, is not given once and for all but, just like the power of an empire, is reconstituted from moment to moment through a sort of endless renewed process of creation, which explains the apparent anomalies of social or political history over half a century. The creation of the world did not happen “in the beginning,” it happens from day to day. The Marquise de Saint-Loup thought, “I am the Marquise de Saint-Loup,” in the knowledge that the night before she had turned down three invitations to dine with duchesses. But if to a certain extent her name enhanced the distinctly un-aristocratic circles which she entertained, by an inverse movement the circles which invited the Marquise devalued the name that she bore. Nothing resists such movements,”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“Yet as soon as he acquired his social position, he ceased to take advantage of it. It was not merely because once he was an official guest he no longer experienced any pleasure at being invited, but also, because of the two vices which had competed so long within him, the least natural, snobbery, gave way to the other, more natural one, since it marked a return, however devious, to nature.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“How many characters in each word does a person read when his mind is on other things and when he is already sure that he knows who the letter is from? How many words in each sentence? We guess as we read, we invent; everything stems from one initial error; those that follow (and this not only in reading letters and telegrams, not even only in all acts of reading), however extraordinary they may seem to someone who does not share the same starting-point, are natural enough. Thus it is that a great deal of what we believe to be true, not to mention the ultimate conclusions that, with equal perseverance and good faith, we draw from it, results from an initial misconception of the premiss.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“And since between the memory of a dream and the memory of something real there is no great difference, I finally started wondering whether the strange drift into this somber fragment of Venetian crystallization, revealing to my moonlit meditations a great square surrounded by Romantic palaces, had not occurred while I was asleep.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“Our love of life is no more than an old affair that we do not know how to discontinue. Its strength lies in its permanence. But death, which interrupts it, will cure us of our desire for immortality.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“For old age removes the ability to act, but not to desire. It is only in a third phase that those who live to a great age renounce desire, after being obliged to abandon action. They no longer stand for such petty elections as that of President of the Republic, where they so often formerly strove to succeed. They are content merely to go out, to eat, and to read the newspapers. They have outlived themselves.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“But the most important thing to admit is this: although, on the one hand, lying is often a trait of character, it is, on the other hand, in women who would not otherwise be liars, a natural defense, at first spontaneous and then gradually more organized, against that sudden danger which is capable of destroying anyone’s life: love.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“Perhaps, I thought, it was Albertine’s vice itself, the cause of my later suffering, which had produced in Albertine her frank and generous manner, creating the illusion that one enjoyed with her the same loyal and unrestrained camaraderie as with a man, just as a parallel vice had produced in M. de Charlus a feminine subtlety of wit and sensibility. In the midst of the most utter blindness, our perspicacity subsists in the very guise of predilection and tenderness, so that it is wrong in love to talk of a bad choice, since, as soon as there is a choice, it can be only a bad one.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“For indeed, did not my choosing and falling in love with Albertine, despite all the denials of my reason, entail knowing Albertine in all her vileness? And even in the moments when our mistrust recedes, is love not its prolongation and its transformation? Is love not a proof of clear-sightedness (a proof unintelligible to the lover himself) since desire, always seeking what is most opposite to us, forces us to love what makes us suffer? The charm of a person, of her eyes, her mouth and her figure, certainly also contains just those elements which, unbeknown to ourselves, are most likely to make us unhappy, so that to feel ourselves drawn toward this person, to start to love her, is, however innocent we claim her to be, already to start reading between the lines all her misdeeds, all her betrayals.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“Now perhaps this fury against me, which had abated as soon as she saw how sad I was, was only a relapse. Indeed, even those people whom, her eyes sparkling with rage, she had threatened with disgrace, death and imprisonment, using false witness if need be, as soon as she thought they were unhappy and humiliated, she wished them no ill and was ready to shower them with favors. For she was not basically wicked and if, below the surface, her slightly deeper, rather surprising nature did not confirm the kindness that her first delicate attentions had led people to suppose but rather envy and pride, yet, at an even deeper level, her third-degree, that is, her true nature, even if never quite fully realized, tended toward goodness and love of her neighbor. Only, like all people who live in a state which they wish were better, but know no more of this than their desire for it and do not understand that the first condition is to break with their present state—like neurasthenics or morphine addicts who would like to be cured but only as long as no one deprives them of their tics or their morphine, like certain rather worldly religious souls or artistic minds, aspiring to solitude yet prepared to imagine it only in so far as it does not imply absolutely renouncing their former life—Andrée was ready to love all God’s creatures but only as long as she had first managed to see them failing to triumph and, in order to do so, had humiliated them in advance. She did not understand that one should love even the proud and conquer their pride through love rather than more overweening pride. But the fact is that she was like those invalids who want to be cured by the same much-loved means as sustain their illness and which they would immediately cease to love if they abandoned these means. But one may learn to swim and still prefer to keep one’s feet dry.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“I no longer loved Albertine. At most there were occasional days which brought the kind of weather that, modifying and stimulating our sensitivity, restores our contact with reality, making me feel bitterly sad when I thought of her. I suffered from a love that no longer existed. Thus when the weather changes do amputees feel pain in the leg they have lost.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“Some philosophers argue that the external world does not exist and that it is only within ourselves that our lives evolve. Be that as it may, love, even in its humblest beginnings, is a striking example of how little reality means for us. If I had had to draw, describe or inventory the details of Mlle d’Éporcheville’s features from memory, or even to recognize her in the street, I would have found it impossible.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6