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We enjoy lovely music, beautiful paintings, a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented them, in slee...more

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All the products of one period have something in common; the artists who illustrate the poetry of their generation are the same artists who are employ...more

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It was the quartets of Beethoven (numbers 12,13,14, and 15) which over fifty years, created and expanded the the audience of listeners to the quartets...more

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... endowing the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the melancholy which there is in love; guided th...more

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But he did not tell her, for he realised how petty it would appear to her, and how different from what she had expected, less sensational and less tou...more

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And so too, in later years, when I began to write a book of my own, and the quality of some sentences seemed so inadequate that I could not make up my...more

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The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immateria...more

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...the mode by which he "heard" the universe and projected it far beyond himself. Perhaps it was in this, I said to Albertine, this unknown quality of...more

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Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.

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The impression given us by a person or a work (or an interpretation of a work) of marked individuality is peculiar to that person or work. We have bro...more

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Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo thi...more

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Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without th...more

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A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the unexpected options that it reveals at one point, t...more