Marcel Proust, The Captive & The Fugitive Quotes
The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.
It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.
Gardeners produce flowers that are delicious dreams, and others too that are like nightmares.
As soon as jealousy is discovered, it is regarded by the person who is its object as a challenge which justifies deception.
People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked.
I spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was watching her sleep.
It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as there is a choice it can only be a bad one.
So what I had believed to be nothing to me was simply my entire life. How ignorant one is of oneself.
The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than any other thought.
One wants to be understood because one wants to be loved, and one wants to be loved because one loves.
We consider it innocent to desire, and heinous that the other person should do so.
I must choose to cease from suffering or to cease from loving.
I could no longer desire physically without feeling a need for her, without suffering from her absence.
As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savours the past.
She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive.
So difficult is it for us to know, with the dead as with the living, whether a thing would cause them joy or sorrow!
But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real point of intersection between reality and dream.
Every woman feels that the greater her power over a man, the more impossible it is to leave him except by sudden flight: a fugitive precisely because a queen.
