[T]his jealousy gave him, if anything, an agreeable chill, as, to the sad Parisian who is leaving Venice behind him to return to France, a last mosqu… - Marcel Proust

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[T]his jealousy gave him, if anything, an agreeable chill, as, to the sad Parisian who is leaving Venice behind him to return to France, a last mosquito proves that Italy and summer are still not too remote. But, as a rule, with this particular period of his life from which he was emerging, when he made an effort, if not to remain in it, at least to obtain a clear view of it while he still could, he discovered that already it was too late; he would have liked to glimpse, as though it were a landscape that was about to disappear, that love from which he had departed; but it was so difficult to enter into a state of duality and to present to oneself the lifelike spectacle of a feeling one has ceased to possess, that very soon, the clouds gathering in his brain, he could see nothing at all, abandoned the attempt, took the glasses from his nose and wiped them; and he told himself that he would do better to rest for a little, that there would be time enough later on, and settled back into his corner with the incuriosity, the torpor of the drowsy sleeper in the railway-carriage that is drawing him, he feels, faster and faster out of the country in which he has lived for so long and which he had vowed not to allow to slip away from him without looking out to bid it a last farewell.

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About Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, essayist and critic.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust Proust Valentin Louis Georges Eugéne Marcel Proust Valentin-Louis-Georges-Eugéne-Marcel Proust Valentin Louis Georges Eugene Marcel Proust Valentin-Louis-Georges-Eugene-Marcel Proust Bernard d'Algouvres Valentin-Louis-Georges-Eugène-Marcel Proust

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Additional quotes by Marcel Proust

The differences which exist between every one of our real impressions — differences which explain why a uniform depiction of life cannot bear much resemblance to the reality — derive probably from the following cause: the slightest word that we have said, the most insignificant action that we have performed at anyone epoch of our life was surrounded by, and colored by the reflection of things which logically had no connection with it and which later have been separated from it by our intellect which could make nothing of it for its own rational purposes, things, however, in the midst of which — here the pink reflection of the evening upon the flower-covered wall of a country restaurant, a feeling of hunger, the desire for women, the pleasure of luxury; here the blue volutes of the morning sea and, enveloped in them, phrases of music half emerging like the shoulders of water-nymphs — the simplest act or gesture remains immured as within a thousand vessels, each one of them filled with things of a color, a scent, a temperature that are absolutely different one from another, vessels, moreover, which being disposed over the whole range of our years, during which we have never ceased to change if only in our dreams and our thoughts, are situated at the most various moral altitudes and give us the sensation of extraordinarily diverse atmospheres.

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