La fugitiva Quotes

“Dejemos a las mujeres guapas para los hombres sin imaginación.”
― Marcel Proust, Albertine desaparecida: En busca del tiempo perdido VI

“Le chagrin qui n'est nullement une conclusion pessimiste librement tirée d'un ensemble de circonstances funestes, mais la reviviscence intermittente et involontaire d'une impression spécifique, venue du dehors, et que nous n'avons pas choisie.”
― Marcel Proust, La fugitiva

“It is to such sufferings that we attach the pleasure of loving, of delighting in the most insignificant remarks of a woman, which we know to be insignificant, but which we perfume with her scent.”
― Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: The Sweet Cheat Gone

“No es resultado de la casualidad que los hombres intelectuales y sensibles se entreguen siempre a mujeres insensibles e inferiores y les tengan, sin embargo, apego, si la prueba de que no son amados no los cura en absoluto de sacrificarlo todo por conservar junto a ellos a una mujer así”
― Marcel Proust, La fugitiva

“We believe that we may change things around us to suit our desires, we believe this because otherwise we can see no acceptable solution. We do not think of the solution which occurs most frequently and which is also acceptable: when we do not manage to change things to suit our desires, but our desires gradually change. We become indifferent to a situation which we had hoped to change when we found it unbearable.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“How much farther does anguish penetrate in psychology than psychology itself!”
― Marcel Proust, The Sweet Cheat Gone

“For Albertine’s death to have suppressed my suffering, the mortal blow would have had to kill her not only in Touraine, but within me. There, she had never been more alive. To enter inside us, people have been obliged to take on the form and to fit into the framework of time; appearing to us only in successive instants, they have never managed to reveal to us more than one aspect, print more than a single photograph of themselves at a time. This is no doubt a great weakness in human beings, to consist in a simple collection of moments; yet a great strength too; they depend on memory, and our memory of a moment is not informed of everything that has happened since, the moment which it registered still lives on and, with it, the person whose form was sketched within it. And then this fragmentation not only makes the dead person live on, it multiplies her forms. In order to console myself, I would have had to forget not one but innumerable Albertines. When I had succeeded in accepting the grief of having lost one of them, I would have to begin again with another, with a hundred others.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“what we love is too much in the past, consists too much in the time that we have spent together for us to require the whole woman; we wish only to be sure that it is she, not to be mistaken as to her identity, a thing far more important than beauty to those who are in love; her cheeks may grow hollow, her body thin, even to those who were originally most proud, in the eyes of the world, of their domination over beauty, that little tip of a nose, that sign in which is summed up the permanent personality of a woman, that algebraical formula, that constant, is sufficient to prevent a man who is courted in the highest society and is in love with her from being free upon a single evening because he is spending his evenings in brushing and entangling, until it is time to go to bed, the hair of the woman whom he loves, or simply in staying by her side, so that he may be with her or she with him, or merely that she may not be with other people.”
― Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: The Sweet Cheat Gone

“I was not one man only but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close formation, in which there appeared, according to the moment, impassioned men, indifferent men, jealous men.”
― Marcel Proust, La fugitiva

“Il n'y a pas de réussite facile ni d'échecs définitifs.”
― Proust Marcel, La fugitiva

“We fall in love with a smile, the look in someone’s eyes, a shoulder. That is enough; then during the long hours of hope or sadness, we create a person, we compose a character. And later, when we come to know better the person we love, we can no more, whatever cruel realities confront us, detach this kind disposition, this amorous feminine nature, from the person who has that look, or that shoulder, than we can remove her youth from a woman who has grown older but whom we have known since she was young.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“The links between another person and ourselves exist only in our minds. Memory weakens them as it fades, and despite the illusions which we hope will deceive us and with which, whether from love, friendship, politeness, human respect or from duty, we hope to deceive others, we exist on our own. Man is a being who cannot move beyond his own boundaries, who knows others only within himself, and if he alleges the contrary, he is lying.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“As I was reading one of Albertine’s letters announcing her arrival for that very evening, I felt for a second the joy of expectation. In these journeys which return along the same track to a place where in reality we will never return, journeys where we recognize the names and the features of all the stations we stopped at on the outward journey, it sometimes happens that while we have halted at one or other of these stations, we experience for a moment the illusion that we have moved off, but in the direction of the place we have just left, as we did on the way out. The illusion swiftly dies, but for a second we felt ourselves driven forward once more: such is the cruelty of memory.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“Some philosophers argue that the external world does not exist and that it is only within ourselves that our lives evolve. Be that as it may, love, even in its humblest beginnings, is a striking example of how little reality means for us. If I had had to draw, describe or inventory the details of Mlle d’Éporcheville’s features from memory, or even to recognize her in the street, I would have found it impossible.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“The problem with people is that for us they are no more than prints in our mental museum, which fade on exposure. And it is precisely because of this that they form the basis of projects illuminated by our thoughts, but thoughts tire and memories collapse: the day would come when I would happily give Albertine’s room to the first girl who wanted it, as I had given Albertine the agate marble or other gifts of Gilberte’s.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“But life, gradually revealing to me the permanence of our needs, had taught me that if a person is unobtainable we have to settle for someone else, and I felt that what I had asked of Albertine could have been supplied by another, like Mlle de Stermaria.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“And once more I felt above all that memory is not creative, that it is incapable of desiring anything different or even anything better than what we have already possessed; and then that it is mental, so that reality cannot provide it with the state to which it aspires; and finally that the rebirth which it incarnates, since it emanates from a dead person, is less the rebirth of the need for love, as it would have us believe, than that of the need for the missing person. So that even the resemblance to Albertine of the woman whom I had chosen, and the resemblance of her affections, if I managed to obtain them, to those of Albertine, only made me feel all the more the absence of what I had been looking for without realizing it, of what was indispensable for the rebirth of my love, that is Albertine herself, the period that we had lived together, the past which I was seeking without realizing it.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“For since missing a woman is no more than reviving a love that remains subject to the same laws as all love, the force of my regret was increased by the same causes which, while Albertine was alive, would have augmented my love for her and which had always given pride of place to jealousy and pain.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“I needed to live with the idea of the death of Albertine, with the idea of her misdeeds, for these ideas to become habitual, that is for me to be able to forget these ideas and finally forget Albertine herself.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“At last, in Albertine walking with the lady in gray down the little street that led to the bath-house, I saw before my eyes a fragment of that past which seemed to me no less mysterious and terrifying than I had feared when I imagined it enclosed within Albertine’s eyes and within her memories.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“My happiness and my life needed Albertine to be virtuous, thus they had posited once for all that she was. Armed with this salutary faith, I could safely allow my mind to play sadly with the suppositions which it formulated without believing in them. I thought, “Perhaps she does love women,” as one thinks, “I might die during the night”; we say the words to ourselves, but we do not believe them, we make plans for the morrow.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“Although Albertine existed in my memory only in the states in which she had appeared successively during her life, that is, subdivided into a series of temporal fractions, my thoughts, restoring her unity, reconstituted her as a person, and it is on this person that I wanted to form an overall judgment, to know whether she had lied, whether she had loved women, and whether it was in order to be free to frequent them that she had left me.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“Although, as I struggled first to understand Albertine, then to possess her entirely, I had done no more than obey our need to reduce the mystery of any person through experience to elements pettily similar to those composing our own selves, I had not been able to do so without in my turn influencing Albertine’s life.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“But tongues are strangely loosened and are swift to denounce people’s faults when the revenge of the person accused is no longer to be feared.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“since my sorrow was directed not at what Albertine had been for me but at what my heart, desiring to participate in the more general emotions of love, had come to persuade me that she was; then I realized that this life which had so bored me—or at least so I thought—had, on the contrary, been delicious;”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“I have to say that I had known people whose intelligence was superior. But the infinite extent, or the egoism, of love causes us to love people whose intellectual and moral features are the least objectively defined for us, we readjust them endlessly according to our desires and our fears, we cannot separate them from ourselves, they are no more than a vast and vague terrain where we externalize our affection.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“Indeed it seemed to me, in the moments when I suffered the least, that I almost benefited from her death, for a woman is all the more useful in our lives if she is an agent of sorrow rather than an element of happiness, and there is not a single woman whose possession is as precious as the truths which she enables us to discover by making us suffer.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“But I would never have known this now so necessary Albertine, of whose love my soul had become almost entirely composed, if Swann had not spoken to me of Balbec.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“This is a fate which befalls us at a certain age, which may be relatively young, where we may be less attracted by a person than by someone’s rejection, where we ultimately know nothing more of the person we have chosen, whose face has grown dim and whose soul has evaporated, than our all too recent but none the less inexplicable choice itself: the fact is that the only thing that could put an end to our suffering would be if we could hear the words, “Could I come to see you?” My separation from Albertine the day when Françoise had said to me, “Mademoiselle Albertine has left” was like an allegory for so many other separations. For often in order to discover that we are in love, even perhaps in order to fall in love, the day of separation needs to arrive.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6

“Of the state of mind which, for the whole of that far-off year, had been nothing but endless torture to me, nothing remained. For in this world where everything wears out, where everything perishes, there is one thing that collapses and is more completely destroyed than anything else, and leaves fewer traces than beauty itself: and that is grief.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6