Within a Budding Grove

“If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.””

— Marcel Proust

“Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.””

— Marcel Proust

“No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.””

— Marcel Proust

“All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.””

— Marcel Proust

“I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence...””

— Marcel Proust

“Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.””

— Marcel Proust

“The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.””

— Marcel Proust

“There are few who are worthy to understand what I feel. [...] I seek out those who are of this chosen few, and I avoid the rest.””

— Marcel Proust

“I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire...””

— Marcel Proust