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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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... Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused a painful longing to secure the absolute m...more

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She’s an absolute idiot!” she added with the wisdom invariably shown by people who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only b...more

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I have built, deep in my heart, a chapel filled with you.

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Now I could appreciate the merits of a broad, poetical, powerful interpretation, or rather it was to this that those epithets were conventionally appl...more

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... which would enable him to prolong for the time being, and to renew for one day more the disappointment, the torturing deception that must always c...more

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There can be no peace of mind in love since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further desires.

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Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of ...more

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One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.

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All these things and, still more than these, the treasures which had come to the church from personages who to me were almost legendary figures (such ...more

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Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

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With women who do not love us, as with the "dear departed," the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait.

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For, like desire, regret seeks not to be analysed but to be satisfied. When one begins to love, one spends one’s time, not in getting to know what one...more

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Jean's desires, like those of all men in love, were concentrated on the impossible.

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When Jean and his mother left Etreuilles, Monsieur Sureau had gathered for them great boxfuls of hawthorn and of snowballs which Madame Santeuil had n...more