Proust Quotes

• The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

  Alain de Botton

  Looks, May, Failing

  Alain de Botton (2012). “How Proust Can Change Your Life”, p.153, Pan Macmillan

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• I know of no better definition of love than the one given by Proust - Love is space and time measured by the heart.

  Gian Carlo Menotti

  Love, Inspiring, Heart

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• If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.

  Anais Nin

  Happiness, Knowledge, Fever

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• Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.

  Albert Camus

  Flower, Creating, Anxiety

  Albert Camus (1955). “The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays”

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• A ton of Proust isn’t worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury.

  J. G. Ballard

  Rays, Bradbury

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• I'm sure Proust was a big bore.

  Truman Capote

  Bigs, Bores

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.

  Alain de Botton

  World, Scene, Modest

  Alain de Botton (2012). “How Proust Can Change Your Life”, p.164, Pan Macmillan

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• By itself, an ordinary snapshot is no less banal than the petite madeleine in Proust's In Search of Lost Time... but as goad to memory, it is often the first integer in a sequence of recollections that has the power to deny time for the sake of love.

  Michael Lesy

  Memories, Sake, Firsts

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• I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating 'Swann's Way.' There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences.

  Lydia Davis

  Writing, Two, Long

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• Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.

  Jean Cocteau

  Reading, Stupidity, Magnificent

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• Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel.

  Edward St Aubyn

  Reading, Hero, Intelligent

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• Both Proust and Joyce record the ways in which human perspectives can be transformed. In Portrait, Stephen Dedalus is constantly undergoing epiphanies, but their effects are transitory: the new synthetic complex quickly falls apart. Proust's characters, by contrast, often achieve lasting changes of perspective.

  Philip Kitcher

  Fall, Character, Lasting Change

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?

  Manuel Puig

  Country, Writing, People

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• The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We're increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.

  Lev Grossman

  Stars, Real, Ideas

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• We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.

  Oliver Sacks

  Memories, Frozen, Jars

  Oliver Sacks (2012). “Hallucinations”, p.93, Pan Macmillan

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• It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.

  Alain de Botton

  Eye, Our World, Would Be

  Alain de Botton (2012). “How Proust Can Change Your Life”, p.214, Pan Macmillan

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• Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else's dirty water.

  Alexander Woollcott

  Art, Dirty, Reading

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• I have depth. I've read Proust. No, wait, that was Pooh. Winnie the Pooh. My bad" Charley Davidson.

  Darynda Jones

  Waiting, Depth, Charley Davidson

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• A large, still book is a piece of quietness, succulent and nourishing in a noisy world, which I approach and imbibe with "a sort of greedy enjoyment," as Marcel Proust said of those rooms of his old home whose air was "saturated with the bouquet of silence."

  Holbrook Jackson

  Book, Home, Air

  Holbrook Jackson (1950). “The Anatomy of Bibliomania”, p.20, University of Illinois Press

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• Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Inspirational, Courage, Empowerment

  Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

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• Proust had his madeleines; I am devastated by the scent of yeast bread rising.

  Bert Greene

  Food, Cooking, Bread

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• Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

  Cyril Connolly

  Country, Nice, Lying

  "The Unquiet Grave" by Cyril Connolly, (Part 2), 1951.

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• My mother was right: When you've got nothing left, all you can do is get into silk underwear and start reading Proust.

  Jane Birkin

  Mother, Reading, Underwear

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• Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles.

  Edward Abbey

  Men, Circles, Wish

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.31, RosettaBooks

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• I once read somewhere that Sean Connery left school at the age of 13 and later went on to read Proust and Finnegans Wake and I keep expecting to meet an enthusiastic school leaver on the train, the type of person who only ever reads something because it is marvellous (and so hated school). Unfortunately the enthusiastic school leavers are all minding their own business.

  Helen DeWitt

  School, Age, Expecting

  Helen DeWitt (2016). “The Last Samurai”, p.61, New Directions Publishing

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