Les plats se lisent et les livres se mangent.
You’re as strong as the Pont Neuf. You’ll live to bury us all!
Wir werden von einem Leiden nur geheilt, indem wir es bis zum Letzten auskosten.
I spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was watching her sleep.
As soon as jealousy is discovered, it is regarded by the person who is its object as a challenge which justifies deception.
For the possession of what we love is an even greater joy than love itself.
Bodily passion, which has been so unjustly decried, compels its victims to display every vestige that is in them of unselfishness and generosity, and so effectively that they shine resplendent in the eyes of all beholders.
It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.
He lives at Balbec?” crooned the Baron in a tone so far from interrogatory that it is regrettable that the written language does not possess a sign other than the question mark to end such apparently unquestioning remarks. It is true that such a sign would be of little use except to M. de Charlus.
We ought never to lose our tempers with people who, when we find them at fault, begin to snigger. They do so not because they are laughing at us, but because they are afraid of our displeasure.
I felt that I did not really remember her except through the pain, and I longed for the nails that riveted her to my consciousness to be driven yet deeper.
Unfortunately, in the social as in the political world, the victims are such cowards that one cannot for long remain indignant with their executioners.
It’s far more difficult to disfigure a great work of art than to create one.
I never much like thus being told without possibility of reply what I am to think about people whom I know.
The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome.
As profession recognizes profession, so, too, does vice.
In most women’s lives, everything, even the greatest sorrow, comes down to a question of ‘I haven’t got a thing to wear’.
We forgive the crimes of individuals, but not their participation in a collective crime.
Why, when we regain consciousness, is it not an identity other than the one we had previously that is embodied in us? It is not clear what dictates the choice nor why, among the millions of human beings we might be, it is the being we were the day before that we unerringly grasp.
Was the happiness of knowing these girls really unattainable? It would certainly not have been the first happiness of that sort which I had abandoned all hope of ever enjoying?