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Marcel on healthy cohabiting:

normally I could dream only when she was not there, but at these times the power of dreaming returned as I lay next to her, as if in her sleep she had turned into a plant.

The sound of Albertine’s breathing, growing louder, could almost have been mistaken for the breathlessness of pleasure, and as my own pleasure reached completion, I could kiss her without breaking into her sleep.

Arriving home, I had had the feeling of being a prisoner, not at all of returning to a female captive.

Metafiction:

her first words were ‘darling’ or ‘my darling’, followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would produce ‘darling Marcel’ or ‘my darling Marcel’

Why I am a great writer:

I explained to Albertine that great writers have only ever written a single work, or rather, refracted through different media a single beauty which each of them has brought to the world.

Fiction and reality:

the dancers who had not yet eaten, so as to be able to jump even higher, their director, the scene-painters, the great composers Igor Stravinsky and Richard Strauss

Great bits:

on days when the weather was pronounced hopelessly bad, just living in a house placed at the centre of steadily falling rain had the gentle smoothness, the calming silence, the absorbing interest of a sea-voyage

extreme circumstances exaggerate what was already present in a man, diligence in the hard worker and laziness in the idler

We find desiring innocent, and hideous that the other should desire

What is more usual than to lie, whether we wish to conceal, say, the daily fluctuations of our health when we want to represent it as strong, or to hide a vice, or to go, without hurting another, towards the thing which we prefer? Lying is the most necessary means of self-preservation, and the most used.

Someone else’s death is like being on a journey and remembering, a hundred kilometres from Paris, that one has left behind two dozen handkerchiefs, forgotten to give a key to the cook, to say goodbye to one’s uncle, or to ask the name of the town where the ancient fountain is that one so wants to see.

the people we value most are always those who have great virtues, and apply them unstintingly to the furtherance of our vices

if we went to Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, everything we might see there would take on the same aspect as the things we know on Earth. The only real journey, ... would be to travel not towards new landscapes, but with new eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them can see, or can be; and we can do that with the help of an Elstir, a Vinteuil; with them and their like we can truly fly from star to star.

the gestures expressive of panic terror have changed so little, that the old gentleman to whom something unpleasant was happening in a Paris drawing-room struck again, without knowing it, the small number of stylized attitudes which in archaic Greek sculpture indicated the alarm of nymphs being pursued by the god Pan.

we think of the future as a reflection of the present projected into an empty space, while it is often the immediate result of causes which for the most part escape us.

as narrator, I describe my feelings to [the reader] at the same time as repeating my words. But if I were to hide the former from him so that he heard only the latter, my actions, which corresponded so little to my words, would so often give him the impression of strange changes in direction that he would think me almost mad.