Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.

For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.

I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.

Dance music ... stirs some barbaric instinct - lulled asleep in our sober lives - you forget centuries of civilization in a second, & yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them.

It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.

The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom.