Sodome Et Gomorrhe - Deuxième Partie

“Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything, the brain emptied of that past which was life until then. And perhaps it is more wonderful still when our landing at the waking-point is abrupt and the thoughts of our sleep, hidden by a cloak of oblivion, have no time to return to us gradually, before sleep ceases. Then, from the black storm through which we seem to have passed (but we do not even say ), we emerge prostrate, without a thought, a that is void of content.””

— Marcel Proust

“It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.””

— Marcel Proust

“But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.””

— Marcel Proust

“...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.””

— Marcel Proust

“Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey.””

— Marcel Proust

“...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.””

— Marcel Proust

“It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.””

— Marcel Proust

“The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.””

— Marcel Proust

“We passionately long for there to be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years, we are unfaithful to what we once were, to what we wished to remain immortally. Even without supposing that death is to alter us more completely than the changes that occur in the course of our lives, if in that other life we were to encounter the self that we have been, we should turn away from ourselves as from those people with whom we were once on friendly terms but whom we have not seen for years… We dream much of a paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost too.””

— Marcel Proust