"... the reigns of the kings and queens who are portrayed as kneeling with clasped hands in the windows of churches, were stained by oppression and bloodshed."

"Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it."

"Every person is destroyed when we cease to see him; after which his next appearance is a new creation, different from that which immediately preceded it, if not from them all."

"In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life."

"Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself."

"In the case of Albertine, I felt that I should never discover anything, that, out of that tangled mass of details of fact and falsehood, I should never unravel the truth: and that it would always be so, unless I were to shut her up in prison (but prisoners escape) until the end."

"Reading is at the threshold of the spiritual life, it can introduce us to it. It does not constitute it ... There are certain cases of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline ... reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the Spirit."

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

"... the serpent hissing between the lips of Envy is so huge, and so completely fills her wide-opened mouth that the muscles of her face are strained and contorted,..."

"It was not that Madame Santeuil's moral values had altered, but only her view of the moral values of others."

"Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up."

"... rejoicing in a peace which brings only an increase of anxiety,..."

"A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by love reciprocal torture."

"It was that evening, when my mother abdicated her authority, that marked the beginning, along with the slow death of my grandmother, of the decline of my will and of my health. Everything had been decided at the moment when, unable to bear the idea of waiting until the next day to set my lips on my mother's face, I had made my resolution, jumped out of bed, and gone, in my nightshirt, to stay by the window through which the moonlight came, until I heard M. Swann go. My parents having gone with him, I heard the garden gate open, the bell ring, the gate close again..."

"He had so long since ceased to direct his life toward any ideal goal, and had confined himself to the pursuit of quotidian satisfactions, that he had come to believe, though without ever formally stating his belief even to himself that he would remain all his life in that condition, which only death could alter."

"We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence."

"This compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without result was so cruel that one day, noticing a swelling over his stomach, he felt an actual joy in the idea that he had, perhaps, a tumor that would prove fatal, that he need not concern himself with anything further, since it was this malady that was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the not-distant end. If indeed, at his period, it often happened that, though without admitting it even to himself, he longed for death, it was in order to escape not so much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the monotony of his struggle."

"One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone."

"... the courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the 'other side'..."

"The real propaganda is what-if we are genuinely a living member of a nation-we tell ourselves because we have hope, hope being a symbol of a nation's instinct of self-preservation. To remain blind to the unjustness of the cause of the individual "Germany," to recognise at every moment the justness of the cause of the individual "France," the surest way was not for a German to be without judgement, or for a Frenchman to possess it, it was, both for the one and for the other, to be possessed of patriotism."

"There can be no peace of mind in love since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further desires."

"Was the happiness of knowing these girls really unattainable? It would certainly not have been the first happiness of that sort which I had abandoned all hope of ever enjoying?"

"We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening."

"The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years."

"...but the loss of a memory, like the omission of a phrase during reading, rather than making for uncertainty, can lead to a premature certainty."

"Their arrogance protected them against any liking for their fellow-man, against the slightest interest in the strangers sitting all about them, amidst whom M. de Stermaria adopted the manner one has in the buffet-car of a train, grim, hurried, stand-offish, brusque, fastidious and spiteful, surrounded by other passengers whom one has never seen before, whom one will never see again and towards whom the only conceivable way of behaving is to make sure that they keep away from one's cold chicken and stay out of one's chosen corner-seat."

"A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift."

"The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."

"A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves."

"People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others."

"But one never finds a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer's leap in the air quite as high as one has been expecting."

"And so too, in later years, when I began to write a book of my own, and the quality of some sentences seemed so inadequate that I could not make up my mind to go on with the undertaking. I would find the equivalent in Bergotte. But it was only then, when I read them in his pages, that I could enjoy them; when it was I myself who composed them, in my anxiety that they should exactly reproduce what I had perceived in my mind's eye, and in my fear of their not turning out "true to life," how could I find time to ask myself whether what I was writing was pleasing!"

"Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true."

"I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time."

"I spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was watching her sleep."

"My aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would not see Swann again, that she would never leave her own house any more, but this ultimate seclusion seemed to be accepted by her with all the more readiness for the very reason which, to our minds, ought to have made it more unbearable; namely, that such a seclusion was forced upon her by the gradual and steady diminution in her strength which she was able to measure daily, which, by making every action, every movement 'tiring' to her if not actually painful, gave to inaction, isolation and silence the blessed, strengthening and refreshing charm of repose."

"The glutton usually realizes that gout is ever ready to pounce, and that alcohol is bad for him. But possible disaster weighs light in the scale against certain pleasure."

"In Swann's mind, however, these words, meeting no opposition, settled and hardened until they assumed the indestructibility of a truth so indubitable that, if some friend happened to tell him that he had come by the same train and had not seen Odette, Swann would have been convinced that it was his friend who had made a mistake as to the day or hour, since his version did not agree with the words uttered by Odette. These words had never appeared to him false except when, before hearing them, he had suspected that they were going to be. For him to believe that she was lying, and anticipatory suspicion was indispensable."

"It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil."

"Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind."

"Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments."

"... so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea."

"The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity."

"And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the girl of my dream."

"... even in his most artificial creations, nature is the material upon which man has to work; certain spots will persist in remaining surrounded by the vassals of their own special sovereignty, and will raise their immemorial standards among all the 'laid-out' scenery of a park, just as they would have done far from any human interference, in a solitude which must everywhere return to engulf them, springing up out of the necessities of their exposed position, and superimposing itself upon the work of man's hands."

"When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls...bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory."

"The so-called sensitivity of neurotics develops along with their egotism, they cannot bear for other people to flaunt the sufferings with which they are increasingly preoccupied themselves."

"People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked."

"One felt that in her renunciation of life she had deliberately abandoned those places in which she might at least have been able to see the man she loved, for others where he had never trod."

"The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing."