Reading Proust for Fun

is the only thing that exists for us, and we project it into the past, or into the future, without letting ourselves be stopped by the fictitious barriers of death. (V 712)

"...I felt that I was touching no more than the sealed envelope of a person who inwardly reached to infinity." (V 520)

But the true nature which we repress continues nevertheless to abide within us. (V 387)

fastened itself, glued itself to the passer-by, so adhesive, so corrosive, that you felt that, in withdrawing, it must tear away the skin. (V 193)

We must constantly choose between health and sanity on the one hand, and spiritual pleasures on the other. I have always been cowardly enough to choose the former. (V 159)

is a grave disease, but it is localized and so does not utterly corrupt the soul. (V 8)

Of the different persons who compose our personality, it is not the most obvious that are the most essential. (V 5)

He talked with the same irritating fluency, but his words no longer struck a chord, having to overcome a hostile silence or disagreeable echoes; what had changed was not what he said, but the acoustics of the room and the attitude of the audience. (IV 475)

... Every fresh glimpse is a sort of rectification, which brings us back to what we, in fact, saw. (II 678)

In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind. II 423

I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness. II 318

... it was what gave her away; she had not taken into account that this fragmentary detail of the truth had sharp edges that could fit only into the contiguous fragments of the truth from which she had arbitrarily detached it, edges which, whatever the fictitious details in which she might embed it, would always reveal, by their excess of material and their unfilled empty areas, that its proper place was elsewhere.

Upon the sort of screen, patterned with different states and impressions, which my consciousness would quietly unfold while I was reading, and which ranged from the most deeply hidden aspirations of my heart to the wholly external view of the horizon spread out before my eyes at the foot of the garden, what was from the first the most permanent and the most intimate part of me, the lever whose incessant movements controlled all the rest, was my belief in the philosophic richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate these to myself, whatever the book might be.