The tightfisted sea!

The tightfisted sea! in its willful silence
Says: 'I know nothing,
I have not seen any pearls!'

Rumi : Divan 109:1-9

Marcel Proust was born on 10 July 1871

Marcel Proust was born on 10 July 1871 (French novelist and author, 1871-1922)

(on which day, coincidentally, I finished reading "The Fugitive" and moved onto "Finding Time Again", in 2005)

Grief

For in this world where everything wears out, where everything perishes, there is one thing that collapses and is more completely destroyed than anything else, and leaves fewer traces than beauty itself: and that is grief.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Fugitive" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 656, Penguin Classics, 2003

... daily habits existed whose origins we ourselves had forgotten ...

As some need the scent of a forest or the sound of the lapping waters of a lake, I needed to feel her sleeping beside me at night and, during the day, to have her always beside me in the car. For even if we forget a love affair, it may determine the form of the love affair that follows. Already in the very heart of the earlier love affair daily habits existed whose origins we ourselves had forgotten; it was the anguish we first felt one day which made us desperately desire, then systematically repeat like rituals whose original meaning is forgiven, our beloved all the way back to her door, to move her into our home, to attend in person or through the presence of a trusted friend all her comings and goings - all these habits are smooth highways where every day our love follows paths which in former times were scored out by the molten lava of our ardent emotions. But these habits survive the disappearance of the woman concerned, even her memory. They shape, if not all our love affairs, at least certain of our loves, as they recur in turn.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Fugitive" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
pps. 641-2, Penguin Classics, 2003

Everything we believe imperishable tends towards destruction

Everything we believe imperishable tends towards destruction; a social position, like everything else, is not given once and for all but, just like the power of an empire, is reconstituted from moment to moment through a sort of endless renewed process of creation, which explains the apparent anomalies of social or political history over half a century. The creation of the world did not happen 'in the beginning', it happens from day to day.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Fugitive" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 633, Penguin Classics, 2003

.. a creature of no fixed age ...

For man is a creature of no fixed age, a creature who has the ability to become years younger in only a few seconds and who, surrounded by walls formed by the periods of time that he has lived through, floats around in their midst but as in a pool whose level keeps constantly changing, thus putting hiim within reach now of one time period, now of another.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Fugitive" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 578, Penguin Classics, 2003

Happiness

"Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you"
Nathaniel Hawthorne (born July 4, 1804, died 1864)
(American short-story writer and novelist)