Romantic love is only an illusion. It’s a story one makes up in one’s mind about another person.
And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.
How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.
No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.
Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes.
Fear no more, says the heart...
It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.
She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life – one scratched on the wall.
Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?
He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence.
Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.
The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom.
I was so pleased and excited by your letter that I trotted about all day like a puppy with a bone.
Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?
It is part of the novelist’s convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance...
To stand in a great bookshop crammed with books so new that their pages almost stick together, and the gilt on their backs is still fresh, has an excitement no less delightful than the old excitement of the second-hand bookstall.
For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn...
It doesn’t have to be the truth, just your vision of it, written down.
After all, what is a lovely phrase? One that has mopped up as much Truth as it can hold.