"For my part, I am trying to wake up, — to wring slumber out of my pores."

"I am thinking less than before of a doctor. Psychoanalysis is too basic a help for me, it helps once and for all, it clears out, and to find myself cleared out one day would perhaps be even more hopeless than this disorder."

"In short, I can say all I think, and what I want to do is to test once and for all to what extent modern mankind — so proud of its freedom of thought — can endure free thought."

"Ainsi, continuons simplement à dériver ! Nous finirons certainement, mon cher et courageux ami, par devenir deux bons nageurs."

"Je suis avant tout homme de loisir et de caprice, il me faut mes heures, j’ai des calmes plats et des tempêtes."

""We must have our bread." But what is our bread ? Is it baker's bread ? Methinks it should be very home-made bread."

"Enfin, je trouve tant de douceur dans cette solitude, et une tranquillité si agréable, que ce n'est que là que je me plais."

"Nous ne voulons pas laisser s'en aller ainsi de la Morgue à la table de dissection un poète que nous admirions et que nous aimions..."

"Perhaps you have hit upon the ideal of being a poet because you see a poet as an original, a perceptive and a pious man, pure in heart..."

"The sea is like music; it has all the dreams of the soul within itself and sounds them over."

"Little by little I made an inner life for myself. I read a great deal of Hugo and Gautier. We begin with the picturesque and the romantic."

" Dernière promenade, dernière visite à la mer, aux côtes, à tout ce magnifique paysage qui m'enchante depuis deux mois."

"Oh ! oui, mon petit monde, ma petite gouttelette imperceptible, tu es à moi seul et désormais à toi seule je serai."

Dearest, much honored master, when one has a very dark childhood behind one, in which the everyday resembles walking in dank cold streets...

Lettres de Marcel Proust à Emmanuel Bibesco.

"J'ai une haine farouche pour la sottise qui m'entoure..."

"We cannot talk and laugh more, in the parlor where we met, but we learned to love for aye, there, so it is just as well."

"C’est le courage de ne garder sur le cœur la moindre question qui caractérise le philosophe. "

"Wealth and rapidity are what the world admires, and what everyone strives to attain."

"Merci pour ton message de Nouvel An. Il est triste et déprimé et je ne comprends cela que trop bien."

"Je me sens caméléon, caléidoscope, protée, muable et polarisable de toutes les façons, fluide, virtuel, par conséquent latent..."

"A spa such as this can destroy the magic and ravish the beauty of the most beautiful valley in the Black Forest."