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Meaning
Proust reads grief as something that erases itself more thoroughly than beauty does. The thought points to how sorrow can feel immense while it leaves fewer visible marks, slipping away without a clean trace and making memory unreliable. It lands when someone is trying to describe a loss that has faded in public life but still remains privately felt.
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Original Language & Translation
Originally said in English.
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About Marcel Proust
French novelist, literary critic, and essayist
Marcel Proust was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist. He is best known for À la recherche du temps perdu, the seven-volume novel published between 1913 and 1927. That work runs to around 1.25 million words and secured his place among the most influential writers of the twentieth century, according to critics and fellow authors. His reputation rests above all on this long, closely observed novel and on his wider influence on modern literature.
More from Marcel Proust (262 quotes) →Keep reading Marcel Proust
- “And like an aviator who rolls painfully along the ground until, abruptly, he breaks away from it, I felt myse…”Marcel Proust
- “Quite half of the human race was in tears.”Marcel Proust
- “This compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without result was so cruel that one day, no…”Marcel Proust
- “There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.”Marcel Proust
More Grief quotes
- “At that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb and him who lies there than of the altar and Him of whom it spe…”Thomas Hughes
- “The very first Easter taught us this: that life never ends and love never dies.”Kate McGahan
- “It was only in the middle—between the immense and the minute—that sadness seemed to exist.”Alex Latimer
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Books by Marcel Proust
Du côté de chez Swann
2006
Le Côté de Guermantes
1997
À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
1996
Sodome et Gomorrhe
2005
La Prisonnière
2017