Marcel Proust Quotes

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child we were and the souls of the dead from whom we have sprung come to lavish on us their riches and their spells.

For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.

The past lives within the present, and our ancestors breathe through our children.

The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.

I imagine my children are going to save me from my vanity and be my passion and fill whatever fears I have of the amazing time I'm having right now being gone.

Children are the inheritance of the Lord to us in this life and also in eternity. Eternal life is not only to have forever our descendants from this life. It is also to have eternal increase.

I don't want to be someone in my sixties holding on to a group that I created when I was in my twenties.

Grandchildren have taught me how important the future is. I try to look through their eyes and envision what's in their imagination. What's the world going to look like when they're my age? That really does take a huge imagination.

Although becoming a singer was my plan A after first hearing Whitney Houston when I was 17, I started off with plan B by going to the teacher-training college that my dad went to. It was a slow coming of age.

The dead govern the living.

I can't wait to be a grandfather.

We all got older, and we'd tell our children things like, 'Mommy used to be in a famous rock band,' but they didn't believe us. Part of the reason for our reunion was to show our children what we did to make the lives they have possible.

The birth of a child is the imprisonment of a soul.

We do not necessarily improve with age: for better or worse we become more like ourselves.

I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.

One life stamps and influences another, which in turn stamps and influences another, on and on, until the soul of human experience breathes on in generations we'll never meet.

England, an old and exhausted island, must one day be contented, like other parents, to be strong only in her children.

We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor.

[Woman Walks Ahead] is from me being a very bizarre child. From the age of about 8 to the age of about 15, I was obsessed with Native Americans.

I'm sure that growing up in the Midwest played a role in my chronic escapism. In fact, before I lived in France, I lived in Japan, England, and Bulgaria. I was determined to experience other places and cultures, particularly because I had the perception that I'd been cut off from these experiences as a child.

The past seems to infuse into the present, and in the brown, wringled faces of the old people one sees the presence of the past.

I grow old though pleased with my memories The tasks I can no longer complete Are balanced by the love of the tasks gone past I offer no apology only this plea: When I am frayed and strained and drizzle at the end Please someone cut a square and put me in a quilt That I might keep some child warm And some old person with no one else to talk to Will hear my whispers And cuddle near

A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.

I discovered [Joan of Arc] toward the age of ten or twelve, when I went to France. I don't remember where I read about her, but I recall that she immediately took on a definite importance for me. I wanted to sacrifice my life for my country. It seems like foolishness and yet...what happens when we're children is engraved forever on our lives.

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.