I was in my heart of hearts entirely on the side of the weaker party, and of anyone who was in trouble.

We waste precious time on absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.

Some of these new Proust translations seem a little loose

the desire to go to the country in early spring to see once again hawthorns, apple-trees in blossom, storms, the desire for Venice, the desire to settle down to work, the desire to live like other people

After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous

We can sometimes find a person again, but we cannot abolish time.

I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature.

as soon as one gets close to other people, other lives, ready-made labels and classifications appear unduly crude

For the first time I began to feel that it was possible that my mother might live another kind of life, without me, otherwise than for me.

my idleness having given me the habit, when it was a question of my work, of putting it off from one day to another, I imagined that death too might be postponed in the same fashion

beyond the sea, behind a line of woods, began another sea roseate with the light of the setting sun, which was, in fact, the sky

I was still in love with her, even though I believed that I detested her. Whenever anyone told me that I was looking well, or was nicely dressed, I wished that she could have been there to see me.

'You never dreamed, did you, that a piano could be made to express all that?'

his playing has become so transparent, so imbued with what he is interpreting, that one no longer sees the performer himself—he is simply a window opening upon a great work of art

a plentiful light falling sound, as of grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead, gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain

at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all anxiety about the future, all intellectual doubts had disappeared

Then, above the curtains, I would glimpse the bright streak of the daylight and would say to myself that we must be in love with one another after all, since we had spent the night in one another's arms.

I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the subject of my book

the peculiar pleasure which I had felt at certain moments in my life, when gazing, for instance, at the steeples of Martinville, or at certain trees along a road near Balbec, or, more simply, at the beginning of this book, when I tasted a certain cup of tea

enraptured, quivering as though from the shock of an electric spark when the sublime came spontaneously to life at the clang of the brass, panting, intoxicated, unbridled, vertiginous