Love is an incurable malady like those diatheses in which rheumatism lets up only to make way for chronic headaches.
Marcel Proust
A clear view of certain inferiorities in no way diminishes affection; on the contrary, love makes us consider them charming.
Marcel Proust
Each one of us has his own way of being betrayed in love just as each of us has his own way of catching a cold.
Marcel Proust
We get engaged by proxy and then think ourselves obliged to marry the person who has been substituted for our beloved.
Marcel Proust
Of all the means by which love is produced, of all its agents of dissemination, one of the most efficacious is that great wave of anxiety which sometimes passes over us. At such times the die is cast: we shall love the person whose company pleases us at that time. It is not even necessary that up to then we should have liked her more than or even as much as others. What is necessary is that our taste for her should become exclusive.
Marcel Proust
In matters of love, one must not fear, as in ordinary life, merely the future, but even the past, which often does not materialize for us until the future. This is true not only of the past that we learn after the fact, but also of the past that we have long preserved in our minds and that we suddenly learn how to interpret.
Marcel Proust
In truth, to possess one must have desired. We do not possess a line, a surface, or a volume unless our love envelopes it.
Marcel Proust
Everything that seems to us imperishable tends toward its destruction.
Marcel Proust
After a certain age, pride and prudence teach us to pretend not to insist on the very things we most ardently desire. But in matters of love, mere prudence early obliges us to cultivate this talent for duplicity.
Marcel Proust
We like torturing people but without getting really into trouble by killing them.
Marcel Proust
