Marcel Proust Quotes

But I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland.

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.

Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.

Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.

Clothing is . . . an exercise in memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that. They are like signposts in the search for the past.

The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

In Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline seamlessly knits together the past and present of two women, one young and one old. Kline reminds us that we never really lose anyone or anything or – perhaps most importantly – ourselves.

But where are the snows of yester year?

I was born in 1949 - which seems like a long time ago... Actually, it is a long time ago, when I think about it.

I realized I've spent all my life creating a past.

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 remember way back when I was young, 10 years ago.

When I was younger, I was looking for this magic meaning of life.

There is no fence nor hedge round time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it if you can remember.

A lot of things you see as a child remain with you... you spend a lot of your life trying to recapture the experience.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

Young fighters dream of the future. Old fighters seek to recapture the past.

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

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

I look forward and see myself look back.

memory is the only way home.

As I look back over my life, I've been an active person - obviously I was self-absorbed for a period of time.

It's just this: that there are places we all come from-deep-rooty-common places- that makes us who we are. And we disdain them or treat them lightly at our peril. We turn our backs on them at the risk of self-contempt. There is a sense in which we need to go home again-and can go home again. Not to recover home, no. But to sanctify memory.