Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that love often transcends reality and our perceptions of it.
Marcel Proust's quote highlights the powerful and often irrational nature of love, asserting that the feelings and experiences associated with love can overshadow the concrete reality that surrounds us. It implies that in matters of the heart, emotional experiences take precedence over logical or factual truths, illustrating how love shapes our perception of reality regardless of objective circumstances.
In practice
Using this quote during a wedding toast to highlight the depth of love over reality.
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows; how small a thing her charm was for him now compared with the astounding terror that extended out from it like a murky halo, the immense anguish of not knowing at every moment what she had been doing, of not possessing her everywhere and always!
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.
A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.
We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
Holding someone's hand was always my idea of joy.
We were so young, so in love, and so in debt.
She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid.
The life so brief, the art so long in the learning, the attempt so hard, the conquest so sharp, the fearful joy that ever slips away so quickly - by all this I mean love, which so sorely astounds my feeling with its wondrous operation, that when I think upon it I scarce know whether I wake or sleep.
And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.
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