Proust conveys miraculously both the sense of pleasure Marcel takes in the world about him and his intense desire to transmute that pleasure into something permanent by writing about it; but he also conveys the failure of such attempts. I cannot tell you how exhilarating I found this. Instead of feeling that the failure I was encountering daily was a purely personal one, I now saw that it had to do with the nature of the project itself. And, if that was so, then it was something that could be lived with and, by being accepted, be overcome. Overcome not by being left behind but by being incorporated into whatever had to be said.

— Josipovici