The disinterest [of my two great-aunts] in anything that had to do with high society was such that their sense of hearing ... put to rest its receptor organs and allowed them to suffer the true beginnings of atrophy.
Marcel ProustWe were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow.
Marcel ProustA woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.
Marcel ProustHabit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.
Marcel ProustI understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.
Marcel Proust