Every kiss provokes another. Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life. How closely, in their abundance, are they pressed one against another; until lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour, as to count the flowers in a meadow in May. —… Continue reading Marcel Proust

Ah! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes! Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit! (Oh, how large the world is in the brightness of the lamps. How small the world is in the eyes of recollection!) —  Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way: Remembrance of Things Past, Volume One (Grasset,1913)

Even if he did not see her, what happiness it would give him to step on that earth where, not knowing the exact location, at any given moment, of her presence, he would feel palpitating everywhere the possibility of her sudden appearance. — Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, transl. Lydia Davis (Penguin Classics, 2002)

Undoubtedly what is palpitating thus, deep inside me, must be the image, the visual memory which is attached to this taste and is trying to follow it to me. But it is struggling too far away, to confusedly; I can just barely perceive the neutral glimmer in which the elusive eddying of stirred-up colors is… Continue reading Marcel Proust

Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new… Continue reading Marcel Proust