Remembrance of Things Past Volume II Quotes

“In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind. There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.”
- Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove”
― Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past Volume II: The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain