Marcel Proust Quotes

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

All those years and their moments— Crackling bacon, slamming car doors, Poems tried out on friends, Will be one more archive, One more shaky text.

And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay.

Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.

I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.

A tale begun in other days, When summer suns were glowing - A simple chime, that served to time The rhythm of your rowing - Whose echoes live in memory yet, Though envious years would say 'forget.

Alas! the fleeting years, how they roll on!

The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.

The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

Because it is senior year I have begun to see things as potential absences. The things I love will become the things I'll miss.

This moment will just be another story someday.

Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.

Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.

The sands of time cannot be stopped. Years pass whether we will them or not... but we can remember. What has been lost may yet live in memories.

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.

Once time is lit, it will burn whether or not you're breathing it in. Even after smoke becomes air, there is the memory of smoke. I am seeing as if by the light of a match, a glimpse of my life and having it feel right.

We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died longe ago.Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claim me, no doubt I would walk along by that faint light in the brief instant before being flung once again into the abyss of nothingness

As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace.

How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.

Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.