MORE PROUST-ISMS

"the lift-boy swore to me with the sincerity of most false witnesses..."

"the wife had a round face like certain flowers of the ranunculus family, and a large vegetable growth at the corner of her eye. and the generations of mankind preserving their characteristics like a family of plants...an identical growth...protruded below the eye of the son...the wife and son, blessed with a vegetable nature, listened composedly."

"for theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their warfare ensure the continuity of life."

"we ought never to lose our tempers with people who, when we find them at fault, begin to snigger. they do so not because they are laughing at us, but because they are afraid of our displeasure. let us show all pity and tenderness to those who laugh." taking away the condescending "pity," this is a very subtle thing to understand and a very spiritually generous thing for proust to write.
"there is however an inanimate object which is capable of a power of exasperation to which no human being will ever attain: to wit, a piano."

"for it is necessary that even those who are right, like francoise, should be wrong also, so that justice may be made an impossible thing."

"...there is a world of difference between real grief...which literally crushes the life out of one for years if not forever, when one has lost the person one loves--and that other kind of grief, transitory when all is said...which passes as quickly as it has been slow in coming, which we do not experience until long after the event because in order to feel it we need first to 'understand' the event; grief such as so many people feel..."