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"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."
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"A journey of observation must leave as much as possible to chance. Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation."

"The tedious never die, that's what makes them tedious."

"She was the most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from one story to another was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea."

"The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting."

"How do you feel?He rubbed his stomach. "Like I've been eating Styrofoam."

"In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain."

"I'm almost afraid to tell you. Let's put it this way: clean toilets are the least of your problems in this country."

"His shoulder-length hair was a rich, dark-brown color with a slight wave to it and it flowed behind him as he ran into the center of the gypsies. He was tall, muscular, and so beautifully handsome, yet primal. He looked magnificent."

"Human skin hisses like a rattlesnake when it burns."

"Some people just don't have what it takes to appreciate a cookie."
Explore more quotes by Marcel Proust

"Much that for us is fraught with with happiness or misery, remains almost unnoticed by the rest of the world."

"After luncheon the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith,..."

"A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the unexpected options that it reveals at one point, the impasse it presents at another, causes to deviate extensively from his preconceived plan."

"In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be."

"On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book."

"But when his mistress for the time being was a woman in society, or at least one whose birth was not so lowly, nor her position is so irregular that he was unable to arrange for her reception in 'society,' then for her sake he would return to it, but only to the particular orbit in which she moved or into which he had drawn her."

"His jealousy, like an octopus which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle, fastened itself irremovably first to that moment, five o'clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to another again. But Swann was incapable of inventing his sufferings. They were only the memory, the perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from without."

"A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu."
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