A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that a knowledgeable reader can discern the quality of an author's writing from just a small sample of their work.
In this quote, Marcel Proust emphasizes the idea that a skilled and educated reader can assess an author's literary ability through a brief encounter with their text. This highlights the deep connection between language, style, and the impact it has on an audience, suggesting that true literary merit can be evaluated quickly by those with an understanding of literary nuances.
In practice
In a discussion about literature at a book club.
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.
It is a pity, in my opinion, that no prize exists for the writer who best refrains from adding to the world's bad books.
Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version.
The language of my books has shaped me as a man.
My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.
I think there are more good sportswriters doing more good sportswriting than ever before. But I also believe that the one thing that's largely gone out is what made sport such fertile literary territory - the characters, the tales, the humor, the pain, what Hollywood calls 'the arc.'
Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.
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