It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.

People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.

Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.

We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and many of our memories, our moods, our ideas sail away on a voyage of their own until they are lost to sight! Then we can no longer take them into account in the total which is our personality. But they know of secret paths by which to return to us.

A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.

An hour or so later he received a note from Odette. Swann had left his cigarette case at her house. "If only," she wrote, "you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have it back.

I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me.