In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1 Quotes

“The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them; they can inflict on them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them;”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1: Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove, Part 1

“It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and that we come to find out about our own can be no more than what other people have shewn us.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1: Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove, Part 1

“For a long time, I went to bed early.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1: Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove, Part 1

“Reality is formed only by memory.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1: Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove, Part 1

“...das eigentliche Feld, das dem Musiker offensteht, nicht die Klaviatur mit ihren sieben Tönen ist, sondern ein unendliches Manual, das noch ganz unermessen ist, in dem nur hier und da, durch dichtes unerforschtes Dunkel getrennt, einige von Millionen Klangtasten der Zärtlichkeit, der Leidenschaft, der göttlichen Heiterkeit, aus denen es sich zusammensetzt, verschiedenen voneinander wie ein Weltall vom anderen, von einigen großen Künstlern entdeckt worden sind, die, indem sie in uns ein Echo des Themas, das sie anschlagen, wecken, uns den Dienst erweisen, dass wir durch sie sehen, welchen Reichtum, welche Fülle der Vielheit uns unbewusst jene große undurchwanderte, entmutigend ziellose Nacht unserer Seele birgt, die wir für Leere halten und für Nichts.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1: Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove, Part 1

“Mamma spent that night in my room: when I had just committed a sin so deadly that I was waiting to be banished from the household, my parents gave me a far greater concession than I should ever have won as the reward of a good action. Even at the moment when it manifested itself in this crowning mercy, my father's conduct towards me was still somewhat arbitrary, and regardless of my deserts, as was characteristic of him and due to the fact that his actions were generally dictated by chance expediencies rather than based on any formal plan.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1: Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove, Part 1

“Reality must therefore be something that bears no relation to possibilities, any more than the stab of a knife in one’s body bears to the gradual movement of the clouds overhead.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1: Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove, Part 1

“Habit!
that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1: Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove, Part 1

“But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at this
intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I thought no more of it than of myself. The anaesthetic effect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think—and to feel—such melancholy things.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1: Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove, Part 1

“But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as “seeing someone we know” is to some extent an intellectual process.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1: Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove, Part 1

“The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1: Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove, Part 1