Cattleya - Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust

The phrase "to do a cattleya" is used as a playful euphemism for amorous fondling by the characters Odette and Swann in Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

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Famous quotes by marcel proust:

    “I waited alone, in the company of orchids, roses and violets who—like people waiting beside you, but to whom you are unknown—maintained a silence which their individuality of living things rendered more imposing and in their chilly manner received the heat from an incandescent coal fire, preciously placed behind a crystal glass, in a white marble tub where it dropped, from time to time, its dangerous rubies.”
    —Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

    “For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.”
    —Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

    “How the devil am I to prove to my counsel that I don’t know my murderous impulses through C.G. Jung, jealousy through Marcel Proust, Spain through Hemingway ... It’s true, you need never have read these authorities, you can absorb them through your friends, who also live all their experiences second-hand. What an age!”
    —Max Frisch (1911–1991)

    “On the first days, like a piece of music that one will later be mad about, but that one does not yet distinguish, that which I was to love so much in [Bergotte’s] style was not yet clear to me. I could not put down the novel that I was reading, but I thought that I was only interested in the subject, as in the first moments of love when one goes every day to see a woman at some gathering, or some pastime, by the amusements to which one believes to be attracted.”
    —Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

    “To get through their days, nervous natures such as mine have various ‘speeds’ as do automobiles. There are uphill and difficult day which take an eternity to climb, and downhill days which can be quickly descended.”
    —Marcel Proust (1871–1922)