Marcel Proust Quotes

I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.

History is a state of yearning. I yearn for Kay Lake throughout this entire thing. There's an essay I've written where I talked about living in the past. There's a whole motif in the book of then and now. And I lived there.

Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

When I write about things, it's a lot to do with sense memory. How things smell and taste can bring incredible memories flooding back and transport you in an instant to another time and place.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

We all have appointments with the past.

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.

I watch these old films in black and white, and suddenly the door opens, and there I am. The other day, I was wearing the most awful hat.

I'm really obsessed with the past.

Music makes time fall away like almost nothing else. You hear a song from another moment of your life, and it really is like you're still there.

Nostalgia is not a place to live.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

[M]emory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

It is in our nature to travel into our past, hoping thereby to illuminate the darkness that bedevils the present.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.

Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death's silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?

Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!

I think a lot about the past, it's true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. And there is not much percentage in the future.

We're captive on the carousel of time, we can't return we can only look behind.

What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?

I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then. Would you?