It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Everything that seemed to fill them full for others we pushed aside, because it stood between us and the pleasures of the Gods.

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.

You know Balbec so well - do you have friends in the area?' I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.' That is not what I meant,' interrupted my father, as obstinate as the trees and as pitiless as the sky.

What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.