Women are all the bloody sameyou can't love for five minutes without wanting it abolished in brats and house bloody wifery.

Don't look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.

What is this love that more than all the cursed deadly or any other of its great movers so moves the soul and soul what is this soul that more than by any of its great movers is by love so moved?

That's what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead.

I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended.

How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life.

Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.