Marcel Proust Quotes

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

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

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.

What's gone will never come back, but it exists when you think of it.

Everything about me remembers everything about you

And so there would always be more to remember that could no longer be seen...our history is always returning to a little patch of weeds and saplings with an old chimney sticking up by itself...and here I look ahead to the resting of my case: I love the house that belonged to the chimney, holding it bright in memory, and love the saplings and the weeds.

I feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old.

History could hover, like a faint perfume or a memory stamped on the back of one's eyelids.

Long since, the desert wind wiped away our footprints in the sand. But at every second of my existence, I remember what happened, and you still walk in my dreams and in my reality. Thank you for having crossed my path.

Someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us

Music is...a form of remembering, a return to the seasons of the heart long gone.

[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.

I explore it now in the only place left for it, my memory.

Nowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.

Remembrance of things past.

Back on its golden hinges The gate of Memory swings, And my heart goes into the garden And walks with the olden things.

I think you can only be nostalgic for something you've lost.

In the days that follow, he begins to remember things about Moushumi, images that come to him without warning while he is sitting at his desk at work, or during a meeting, or drifting off to sleep, or standing in the mornings under the shower. They are scenes he has carried within him, buried but intact, scenes he has never thought about or had reason to conjure up until now.

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

There is pleasure in calm remembrance of a past sorrow.