A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dreams that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.
Marcel ProustMan is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.
Marcel ProustFriendship is in the end no more than: " . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."
Marcel ProustThe creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.
Marcel ProustThere is probably not one person, however great his virtue, who cannot be led by the complexities of life's circumstances to a familiarity with the vices he condemns the most vehemently--without his completely recognizing this vice which, disguised as certain events, touches him and wounds him: strange words, an inexplicable attitude, on a given night, of the person whom he otherwise has so many reasons to love.
Marcel Proust