Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
— Marcel Proust (via monpersonnelsamizdat)
(via gwyon)
When, before leaving the church, as I stood up, a bittersweet scent of almonds escaping from the hawthorns, and then i noticed, on the flowers, little yellower places under which I imagined that scent must be hidden, as the taste of a frangipani must be hidden under the burned parts, or that of Mlle. Vinteuil’s cheeks under their freckles. Despite the silence and stillness of the hawthorns, this intermittent scent was like the murmuring of an intense life with which the altar quivered like a country hedge visited by living antennae, of which I was reminded by the sight of certain stamens, almost russet red, that seemed to have preserved the springtime virulence, the irritant power, of insects now metamorphosed into flowers.
— Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way.
I was saddened by the loss of my strip of pink sky, when I caught sight of it again, now reddening, in the window on the other side, from which it disappeared at another bend in the line. And I dodged from one window to the other, trying to reassemble the offset intermittent fragments of my lovely, changeable red morning, so as to see it for once as a single lasting picture.
— Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (via charlottecollection)
(via libraryland)
Since, of the charm, the grace, the forms of nature, the public knows only what it has absorbed from the cliches of an art slowly assimilated, and since an original artist begins by rejecting these cliches, M. and Mme. Cottard, being in this sense typical of the public, found neither in Vinteuil’s sonata, nor in the painter’s portraits, what for them created the harmony of music and the beauty of painting. It seemed to them when the pianist played the sonata that he was randomly attaching to the piano notes that were not in fact connected to the forms they were used to, and that the painter was randomly hurling colors onto his canvases. When they were able to recognize a form in these canvases, they found it heavy and vulgarized (that is, lacking the elegance of the school of painting through which they viewed all living creatures, even in the street), and lacking truth, as if Monsieur Biche did not know how a shoulder was constructed or that women do not have lavendar hair.
— Marcel Proust Swann’s Way in In Search of Lost Time (Penguin’s Lydia Davis translation.)
Swann had always had this peculiar penchant for amusing himself by rediscovering in the paintings of the masters not only the general characteristics of the real world that surrounds us, but what seems on the contrary the least susceptible to generalization.
— Marcel Proust from Swann’s Way in In Search of Lost Time
