How Proust Can Change Your Life (Vintage International) (Alain De Botton)

length. As Proust’s brother, Robert, put it, “The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have broken a leg in order to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time.”

The more an account is compressed, the more it seems that it deserves no more space than it has been allocated.

(though Proust did happen to feel that “one must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself”).

“the self-satisfaction felt by ‘busy’ men—however idiotic their business—at ‘not having time’ to do what you are doing.”

When he met a palm reader in 1918, the woman was said to have taken a glance at his hand, looked at his face for a moment, then remarked simply, “What do you want from me, Monsieur? It should be you reading my character.”

One way of considering In Search of Lost Time is as an unusually long unsent letter, the antidote to a lifetime of proustification, the flip side of the Athenas, lavish gifts, and long-stemmed chrysanthemums,

details that suggest it would be more accurate to describe the madeleine as provoking a moment of appreciation rather than mere recollection.

There is no doubt that a person’s charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: “No, this evening I shan’t be free.”