a good book is something special, something unforeseeable, and is made up not of the sum of all previous masterpieces but of something which the most thorough assimilation of every one of them would not enable him to discover, since it exists not in their sum but beyond it

"Good God, sir, kings and queens don't amount to much these days," said M. de Guermantes, partly because he liked to be thought broad-minded and modern, and also so as not to seem to attach any importance to his own royal connections, which he valued highly.

I suddenly had a feeling and a presentiment that New Year's Day was not a day different from the rest, that it was not the first day of a new world

whenever society is momentarily stationary, the people who live in it imagine that no further change will occur, just as, in spite of having witnessed the birth of the telephone, they decline to believe in the aeroplane

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

that old desire to rebel against an imaginary plot woven against me by my parents

"To think that I've wasted years of my life, that I've longed to die, that I've experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn't appeal to me, who wasn't even my type!"

we are not free to refrain from forging the chains of our own misery

it frequently happens that one discovers one's error only to substitute for it not the truth but a fresh error

For a long time I would go to bed early.

Since railways came into existence, the necessity of not missing trains has taught us to take account of minutes

the truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps

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.

In the people whom we love, there is, immanent, a certain dream which we cannot always clearly discern but which we pursue.

I had only just, on feeling her for the first time alive, real, making my heart swell to the breaking-point, on finding her at last, learned that I had lost her for ever.

the music of Vinteuil extended, note by note, stroke by stroke, the unknown, incalculable colourings of an unsuspected world

The self that had loved her, which another self had already almost entirely supplanted, would reappear, stimulated far more often by a trivial than by an important event.

tortured by the certainty of the present and the uncertainty of the future, I pictured Albertine starting on a life which she had deliberately chosen to lead apart from me, perhaps for a long time, perhaps for ever

The name Swann had for me become almost mythological, and when I talked with my family I would grow sick with longing to hear them utter it; I dared not pronounce it myself, but I would draw them into the discussion of matters which led naturally to Gilberte and her family

Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed latent in his mind on the same footing as certain other notions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of physical pleasure