Marcel Proust Quotes

Suffering itself is beloved: love and suffering are far closer to each other than love and pleasure.

From such a gentle thing, from such a fountain of all delight, my every pain is born.

Grief is the price we pay for love.

Mysterious love, uncertain treasure, hast thou more of pain or pleasure! Endless torments dwell about thee: Yet who would live, and live without thee!

The source of one's joy is also often the source of one's sorrow.

Despair is part of love.

Can anybody tell what sorrows are locked up with our best affections, or what pain may be associated with every pleasure?

Why is the measure of love loss?

Alexandra sighed. "I have a feeling that if you go away, you will not come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both. People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours if you care enough about me to take it.

Lost in loneliness and pain. Black and unendurable, Thinking of you with every Corpuscle of my flesh, in Every instant of night And day.

Each day brought just another minute of the things they could not leave behind. Jane Barrington sitting on the train coming back to Leningrad from Moscow, holding on to her son, knowing she had failed him, crying for Alexander, wanting another drink, and Harold, in his prison cell, crying for Alexander, and Yuri Stepanov on his stomach in the mud in Finland, crying for Alexander, and Dasha in the truck, on the Ladoga ice, crying for Alexander, and Tatiana on her knees in the Finland marsh, screaming for Alexander, and Anthony, alone with his nightmares, crying for his father.

Love was like rain: it turned into ice, or it disappeared. Now you saw it, now you couldn't find it no matter how hard you might search. Love evaporated; obsession was realer; it hurt, like a pin in your bottom, a stone in your shoe. It didn't go away in the blink of an eye. A morning phone call filled with regret. A letter that said, Dear you, good-bye from me. Obsession tasted like something familiar. Something you'd known your whole life. It settled and lurked; it stayed with you.

Oh! that look of love!" continued he, between his teeth, as he bolted himself into his own private room. "And that cursed lie; which showed some terrible shame in the background, to be kept from the light in which I thought she lived perpetually! Oh, Margaret, Margaret! Mother, how you have tortured me! Oh! Margaret, could you not have loved me? I am but uncouth and hard, but I would never have led you into any falsehood for me.

When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.

How bitterly glad I am to see you. You bring joy and pain in equal measure. Joy because you are with me, but pain because it won't be for long. What do you know about the sea? Nothing. What do I know about the sea? Nothing. Without a driver this bus is lost. Our lives are over. Come aboard if your destination is oblivion-- It should be our next stop. We can sit together. You can have the window seat, if you want. But it's a sad view. Oh enough of this disembling. Let me say plainly: I love you, I love you, I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. Not the spiders, please.

When a person that one loves is in the world and alive and well, and pleased to be in the world, then to miss them is only a new flavor, a salt sharpness in experience. It is when the beloved is unhappy or maimed or troubled that one misses with pain.

Disappointment has a name, it's heartbreak

'T is sweeter for thee despairing Than aught in the world beside,-Jessy!

And wonder, dread and war have lingered in that land where loss and love in turn have held the upper hand.

Ah, me, if this is love, then how it torments.

People who have babies tell me I will know a love that is beyond anything I can imagine, and a joy that is indescribable. Love and joy? That sounds horrifying. I have no way of knowing whether I can handle either of those. I'm much better with need and fear. They are what ground me.

Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.