Author: Marcel Proust

Cites

• Alfred de Vigny (1)
  • IN: Sodom and Gomorrah (1981) Fiction, French
    EPIGRAPH: The women shall have Gomorrah and the men shall have Sodom.
    FROM: The Wrath of Samson, (1839), Poem, France
• Oscar Wilde (1)
  • IN: In Search of Lost Time (1920) Fiction, French
    EPIGRAPH: In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
    FROM: A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated, (1894), Article, Ireland

Cited by

• William Boyd (1)
  • IN: Restless (2006) Fiction, Historical Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: “We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say so we represent that hour to ourselves as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time, it never occurs to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned, or may signify that death — or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again — may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon every hour of which has already been allotted to some occupation. You make a point of taking your drive every day so that in a month’s time you will have had the full benefit of the fresh air; you have hesitated over which cloak you will take, which cabman to call, you are in the cab, the whole day lies before you, short because you have to be at home early, as a friend is coming to see you; you hope that it will be as fine again to-morrow; and you have no suspicion that death, which has been making its way towards you along another plane, shrouded in an impenetrable darkness, has chosen precisely this day of all days to make its appearance, in a few minutes’ time...
    FROM: The Guermantes Way, (1920), Novel, France
• Nathanael West (1)
  • IN: A Cool Million and The Dream Life of Balso Snell (NULL) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: After all, my dear fellow, life, Anaxagoras has said, is a journey
    FROM: Bergotte in In Search of Lost Time, (1927), Novel, France
• K.S. Maniam (1)
  • IN: In a Far Country (1993) Fiction, NULL
    EPIGRAPH: For the truths which the intellect apprehends directly in the world of full and unimpeded light have something less profound, less necessary than those which life communicates to us against our will in an impression which is material because it enters through the sense but yet has meaning which it is possible for us to extract.
    FROM: In Search of Lost Time, (1913), Novel, France
• Justina Chen (2)
  • IN: Blind Spot for Boys (2014) Contemporary, Romance Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
    FROM: Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Time), (1923), Book, France
  • IN: A Blind Spot for Boys (2014) Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
    FROM: The Prisoner, (1923), Novel, France
• Jasmine Warga (1)
  • IN: My Heart and Other Black Holes (2015) Contemporary, Young Adult Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
    FROM: The Prisoner, (1923), Novel, France
• Pearl S. Buck (1)
  • IN: The Good Earth (1931) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: This was what Vinteuil had done for the little phrase. Swann felt that the composer had been content (with the instruments at his disposal) to draw aside its veil, to make it visible, following and respecting its outlines with a hand so loving, so prudent, so delicate and so sure, that the sound altered at every moment, blunting itself to indicate a shadow, springing back into life when it must follow the curve of some more vold projection. And one proof that Swann was not mistaken was that anyone with an ear at all delicate for music would have at once detected the imposture had Vinteuil, endowed with less power to see and to render its forms, sought to disemble (by adding a line, here and there, of his own invention)mthe dimness of his vision or the feebleness of his hand.
    FROM: Swann's Way, (1913), Novel, France
• Elif Batuman (1)
  • IN: The Idiot (2017) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: But the characteristic feature of the ridiculous age I was going through - awkward indeed but by no means infertile - is that we do not consult our intelligence and that the most trivial attributes of other people seme to us to form an inseparable part of their personality. In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind. There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no long possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.
    FROM: In Search of Lost Time, Vol II: Within a Budding Grove, (1913), Novel, France
• Juliann Garey (1)
  • IN: Too Bright To Hear Too Loud to See (2012) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
    FROM: In Search of Lost Time, (1913), Novel, France
• Claire Messud (1)
  • IN: The Woman Upstairs (2013) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a fresh, a third, 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 oneself, the lover.
    FROM: Remembrance of Things Past, (1913), Novel, France
• Keith Lee Morris (1)
  • IN: Travelers Rest (2016) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: A moment of the past, did I say? Was it not perhaps very much more: something that, common both to the past and to the present, is much more essential than either of them?
    FROM: Remembrance of Things Past, (1913), Novel, France
• Orhan Pamuk (1)
  • IN: The White Castle (1990) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: To imagine that a person who intrigues us has access to a way of life unknown and all the more attractive for its mystery, to believe that we will begin to live only through the love of that person -- what else is this but the birth of great passion?
    FROM: In Search of Lost Time, (1913), Novel, France
• M.J Rose (1)
  • IN: The Book of Lost Fragrances (2012) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
    FROM: Remembrance of Things Past, (1913), Novel, France
• Jane Smiley (1)
  • IN: Ten Days in the Hills (2007) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: I thought that I had arrived, like the Caliph in the Arabian Nights, in the nick of time to rescue a man who was being beaten, and in fact it was a different tale from the Arabian Nights which I saw enacted before me, the one in which a woman who has been turned into a dog willingly submits to being beaten in order to recover her former shape.
    FROM: Time Regained, (1927), Novel, France
• Claude Simon (1)
  • IN: The Trolley (2001) Fiction, French
    EPIGRAPH: ... since an image is the essential element, a simplification entirely suppressing real characters would be a decisive improvement.
    FROM: In Search of Lost Time, (1913), Novel, France
• Olivier Rolin (1)
  • IN: Paper Tiger (2002) Fiction, French
    EPIGRAPH: These stories were dozing in thirty-year-old newspapers, and nobody knew about them anymore.
    FROM: The Past Recaptured, (1927), Novel, France
• Daniel Pyne (1)
  • IN: Fifty Mice (2014) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical labouratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
    FROM: The Captive in In Search of Lost Time, (1923), Novel, France
• Dan Simmons (1)
  • IN: Flashback (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: We find a little of everything in our memory; it is a sort of pharmacy, a sort of chemical laboratory, in which our groping hand may come to rest now on a sedative drug, now on a dangerous poison.
    FROM: “The Captive,” Remembrance of Things Past, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor, (1923), Novel, France
• Brian Freeman (1)
  • IN: Goodbye to the Dead (2015) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: ‘We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.’
    FROM: The Sweet Cheat, (1925), Novel, France
• Orly Konig (1)
  • IN: The Distance Home (2017) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
    FROM: In Search of Lost Time, (1913), Novel, France
• Eric Kraft (1)
  • IN: Herb 'n' Lorna (1988) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: The idea that one has long held of a person is apt to stop one's eyes and ears: my mother, for three whole years, had no more noticed the salve with which one of her nieces used to paint her lips than if it had wholly and invisibly dissolved in some clear liquid: until one day a streak too much, or possibly something else, brought about the phenomenon known as supersaturation; all the paint that hitherto passed unperceived was now crystallized, and my mother, in the face of this sudden riot of colour, declared, in the best Combray manner, that it was a perfect scandal.
    FROM: Remembrance of Things Past "Within a Budding Grove", (1913), Novel, France
• Rodrico Fresán (1)
  • IN: The Invented Part (2014) Fiction, NULL
    EPIGRAPH: Can I call this a novel?
    FROM: NULL, (None), NULL, France
• Bernard Comment (1)
  • IN: The Shadow of Memory (1990) Fiction, French
    EPIGRAPH: It's extraordinary and rather horrifying to remember nothing.
    FROM: In Search of Lost Time, (1927), Book, France
• Kate Collins (1)
  • IN: A Root Awakening (2015) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
    FROM: Pleasures and Days, (1896), Book, France
• Jennifer Egan (1)
  • IN: A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, cotemporaneous with different years. The unknown element of the lives of other people is like that of nature, which each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces but does not abolish.
    FROM: In Search of Lost Time, (1927), Novel, France
• Elizabeth Bowen (1)
  • IN: The Last September (1929) Fiction, Irish
    EPIGRAPH: Ils ont les chagrins quónt les vierges et les paresseux
    FROM: Le Temps Retrouvé, (1927), Novel, France
• Ruth Ozeki (1)
  • IN: A Tale for the Time Being (2013) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader’s recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.
    FROM: Le temps retrouve, (1927), Novel, France
• A. S. Byatt (2)
  • IN: Still Life (1985) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: J'essayais de trouver la beauté là oû je ne m'étais jamais figuré qu'elle fût, dans les choses les plus usuelles, dans la vie profonde des <>.
    FROM: A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs., (1918), Novel, France
• Stacy Robinson (1)
  • IN: Surface (2015) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
    FROM: The Prisoner, (1923), Novel, France
• Nadine Gordimer (1)
  • IN: None to Accompany Me (1994) Fiction, NULL
    EPIGRAPH: We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.
    FROM: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2, (1927), Novel, France
• Andreï Makine (1)
  • IN: Dreams of My Russian Summers (1995) Novel, French
    EPIGRAPH: ... it was with a childish pleasure and a profound emotionthat, being unable to mention the names of so many others who must have acted similarly and thanks to whom France has survived, I gave the real names here. ...
    FROM: Le Temps retrouvé, (1927), Novel, France