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Marcel the artist:
How ever often I dined out, I did not see the other guests, because when I thought I was looking at them, I was in fact radiographing them.

Marcel the racist:
It is very easy to imagine, somewhere within that ancient family, a golden-haired aristocrat, intelligent, endowed with every distinction, concealing deep down, unknown to everybody, a secret taste for negroes.

Robert the racist cokehead:
living in the open with Senegalese troops who were sacrificing their lives at every moment, an intense cerebral pleasure into which was infused a great deal of scorn for the ‘little musk-scented gentlemen’, and which, contradictory though it might seem, was not so different from the pleasure derived from the cocaine he had taken too much of at Tansonville

Charlus the paedophile:
The Baron, misled by the voice, which was in fact much lower than is usual at that age (and remember the Baron was still, at that point, completely blind), this man who used to have a taste for somewhat older men, was with a child who wasn’t even ten years old.’

Marcel trying to write slang:
Yes, they’re good blokes all right. Poor sods like us haven’t got much to lose, but a gentleman who’s got loads of servants, who can go out for fancy drinks at six o’clock every day, that’s pretty wonderful! You can laugh if you like, but when you see blokes like that dying it really gets to you. God shouldn’t let rich blokes like that die...

Marcel on writers trying to write slang:
It rang false, like passages in books where the author has tried to write slang.

War:
The church [in Combray] was destroyed by the French and the English because it was being used as an observation-post by the Germans

Mind-boggling:
Because of their kilts, and because certain lacustrine dreams are often associated with these desires, the Scots were at a premium [in gay brothels].

Metafiction: Marcel on a translation by one M. Proust
(he was alluding to a translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies which I had sent M. de Charlus)

In this book, in which there is not one fact that is not fictitious, not one real character concealed under a false name, in which everything has been made up by me in accordance with the needs of my exposition, I have to say, to the honour of my country, that Françoise’s millionaire relatives alone... are real, living people.

People pretending to like art:
the whole absurd pantomime of a gosling with half-grown winglets which has not solved the problem of wings but is none the less tormented with a desire to soar into the air

she continued to believe that being easily bored was a sign of intellectual superiority, but she expressed this with a sort of violence which gave her voice rather a harsh tone.

The Duchesse becomes Madame Verdurin:

Basin, who is not a sensitive soul, was struck by the effect that it had on me. He said to me: “I don’t want you listening to this nonsense any more, it’s making you ill.” And it was true, people think I’m an unfeeling woman, when really I’m just a bundle of nerves.’

Marcel on literature:
Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, ... is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as in the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it.

It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon.

In reality each reader, when he is reading, is uniquely reading himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument which he offers the reader to enable him to discern what without this book he might not perhaps have seen in himself.

above all [writing] involved ... ceasing to believe in the objectivity of what one had elaborated oneself, and instead of comforting oneself ... with the words: ‘She was very nice,’ reading what underlay them: ‘I enjoyed kissing her.’

Wisdom:
happiness alone is good for the body; whereas sorrow develops the strength of the mind

Marcel on being over 50:
But the spinster’s mother, on the contrary, felt as if she had won a victory in a competition against distinguished competitors every time that a person her age ‘disappeared’. Their deaths were the sole means by which she could still become pleasantly aware of her own life.

(Proust died at 51.)

@ianhunt Enjoy it when the time comes!