Marcel Proust Quotes

Memory, in my opinion, is a complete noodle. It hangs on the silliest things but forgets the stuff that really matters.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

Memory is a gulf that a word can move to its lowest depths.

It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.

Memory feeds imagination.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.

Books are like flypaper, memories cling to the printed pages better than anything else.

People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.

Memory. My poison, my food.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]

We consider ourselves as defective in memory, either because we remember less than we desire, or less than we suppose others to remember.

If you take a book with you on a journey," Mo had said when he put the first one in her box, "an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it... yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.

We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul.

What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.

We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and many of our memories, our moods, our ideas sail away on a voyage of their own until they are lost to sight! Then we can no longer take them into account in the total which is our personality. But they know of secret paths by which to return to us.

The most important, the longest lasting, the strongest emotional, and the most practiced memories are the ones that are embedded the deepest in the brain, and because we have retrieved them so many times previously, they are the most able to be retrieved. We all hear about people who can remember their youth, their phone number, or street address from 70 years ago, but they cannot recall what they had for breakfast. The memory of this morning's breakfast wasn't rehearsed, and wasn't very important, so it fades away quickly.

No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books.

Memory works like the collection glass in the Camera obscura: it gathers everything together and therewith produces a far more beautiful picture than was present originally.

A diary need not be a dreary chronicle of one's movements; it should aim rather at giving salient account of some particular episode, a walk, a book, a conversation.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

Human memory works its own wheel, and stops where it will, entirely without reference to the last stop, and with no connection with the next.

There are books that I read years ago that enlivened things in me that haven't died yet.

In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.