Marcel Proust Quotes

People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

The dead are never far from us. They're in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final puff of air.

The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone.

Death, vicious death, Leave a green branch for love.

Even the death of Friends will inspire us as much as their lives. They will leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to defray the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss; for our Friends have no place in the graveyard.

How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?

The distance that the dead have gone Does not at first appear- Their coming back seems possible For many an ardent year.

In death, lie. In living, cry. Carry me home to remember to be remembered.

They tell me, Lucy, thou art dead, that all of thee we loved and cherished has with thy summer roses perished; and left, as its young beauty fled, an ashen memory in its stead.

There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. […] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.

The dead have a presence.

When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.

You think the dead we loved truly ever leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly in times of great trouble?

I like to think that people live on in other people's memories.

What does one do about the dead? They live forever.

What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?

No one is truly dead until they are no longer loved.

The body is the one thing you have to say goodbye to. You can hold on to your memories. You can hold on to the spirit. That's part of the package that you love and the part that comforts you.

I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.

Mourn for me rather as living than as dead.

I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.

Just because someone's dead doesn't mean it's over. My grandfather died more than 25 years ago, but I still think of him a lot and smell his smell.

I'll never forget the first time I saw someone who had died. It was my grandfather. And I knelt next to his coffin. And all I could do was eye level was look at his hands. They were enormous hands. And all I could think was, 'Those hands dug freedom for me.'