"His [Morel's] nature was really like a sheet of paper that has been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten it out."
"After a certain age, and even if we develop in quite different ways, the more we become ourselves, the more our family traits are accentuated."
"The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome."
"It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering."
"The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it."
"For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart."
"A man who, night after night, falls like a lump of lead upon his bed, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will such a man ever dream of making, I do not say great discoveries, but even minute observations upon sleep? He barely knows that he does sleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. A memory without fault is not a very powerful incentive to studying the phenomena of memory."
"We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence."
"In the case of Albertine, I felt that I should never discover anything, that, out of that tangled mass of details of fact and falsehood, I should never unravel the truth: and that it would always be so, unless I were to shut her up in prison (but prisoners escape) until the end."
"There is no need, in order to explain three-quarters of the opinions held about people, to go so far as a love that has been spurned or an exclusion from political power. Our judgment remains unsure: an invitation refused or received determines it."
"Soon, what was tedious was everything. 'Beautiful things, they're so tedious! Paintings, they're enough to drive you mad...How right you are, it's so tedious, writing letters!' In the end it was life itself that she declared to us was a bore, without one quite knowing from where she was taking her term of comparison."