Marcel Proust Quotes

Not understanding anything is terrible, because I communicate very much in my real life.

This time I m not going to tell you a story. I'll just say that insanity is the inability to communicate your ideas. It's as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that's going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don't understand the language they speak there.

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor.

Outside the pale of society, language is just as useless as an eye in darkness

I have some English words on the first album, but any time I try to do it, you miss something. You think it's just a simple translation from French to English, but it's so different as far as the understanding.

I can communicate what I want to in Tamil, but I can't express myself in the language very well.

I hate when I see someone who speaks English speaking to someone who speaks a different language, and they're screaming as if going louder is going to help the other person understand.

We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.

I think it's strange to live in a house with someone you cannot talk to-especially when that someone is your father-and the thought makes me a little sad.

My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. 'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? 'I never know what you are thinking. Think.

INTERPRETER, n. One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said.

When one man speaks to another man who doesn't understand him, and when a man who's speaking no longer understands, it's metaphysics.

Language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

safety and love are both illusions!

Aimwell: Then you understand Latin, Mr. Bonniface? Bonniface: Not I, Sir, as the saying is, but he talks it so very fast that I'm sure it must be good.

Are you two having some sort of strange human thing that you can’t follow what I’m saying? (Simi)

Your saying 'I do not understand you' is praise beyond my worth, and an insult you do not deserve.

Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them.

I would start drinking something terrible if I were in a situation where I was surrounded by lies or quiet or secrets. It's just not a real life.

...we were like two people standing apart on separate mountain peaks, recklessly leaning forward to throw stones at one another, unaware of the dangerous chasm that separated us.

So for all that we might speak words in each other's vicinity, this could never develop into anything that could be called a conversation. It was as though we were speaking in different languages. If the Dalai Lama were on his deathbed and the jazz musician Eric Dolphy were to try to explain to him the importance of choosing one's engine oil in accordance with changes in the sound of the bass clarinet, that exchange might have been more worthwhile and effective than my conversations with Noboru Wataya.

The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.

An angry lover tells himself many lies.