She poured out Swann's tea, inquired "Lemon or cream?" and, on his answering "Cream, please," said to him with a laugh: "A cloud!" And as he pronounced it excellent, "You see, I know just how you like it." This tea had indeed seemed to Swann, just as it seemed to her; something precious, and love has such a need to find some justification for itself, some guarantee of duration, in pleasures which without it would have no existence and must cease with its passing.

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.

...a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.