Marcel Proust Quotes

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

People can remember their childhood, but events from four or five years ago are in a never-never land.

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

How is it that we remember the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not remember how often we have recounted it to the same person?

I can remember weird things from way back, but not what I had for breakfast.

Why is it that I can remember so easily the lyrics to the opening theme song of 'Gilligan's Island?' Why do I remember these trivial things, and I can't remember the names of important collaborators?

Goldfish have no memory, I guess their lives are much like mine. And the little plastic castle is a surprise everytime.

It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment - but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer?

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

My memory about names and places now is dreadful. But lines, I can remember.

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

I think you remember everything ... you just can't bring it to mind all the time.

Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist.

With most men, scarce a link of memory holds yesterday and to-day together.

The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgement does its work with difficulty; it is entirely lacking in me.... Now,the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine.

Estragon: I'm like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.

As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. ... I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

A bad memory is the mother of invention.

The more intelligible a thing is, the more easily it is retained in the memory, and counterwise, the less intelligible it is, the more easily we forget it.

Sometimes you don't know if your memory is because you really experienced it or because you look at your old pictures. I have a nice picture of myself held up by my grandfather and my father standing next to me. We all have the same name - we're all called Anton Corbijn. That's something I cherish.

Memories are not recycled like atoms and particles in quantum physics; they can be lost forever.

The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.

There are many books which we think we have read when we have not. There are, at least, many that we think we remember when we do not. An original picture was, perhaps, imprinted upon the brain, but it has changed with our own changing minds. We only remember our remembrance.