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When nothing remains of our remote past, after the people are dead and the things are destroyed, alone - more fragile yet longer lived, more immaterial, more steadfast, more faithful, the smell and taste of things persist, like souls, ready and waiting to remind us; over the ruin of all the rest they bear unflinchingly on their almost impalpable droplet the immense edifice of memory.
Marcel Proust -
The pleasure that all men experience in mulling over their recollections is often keenest in those whom the tyranny of a malady and the daily hope of its cure keep, on the one hand, from seeking in nature images resembling those recollections and yet, on the other hand, leave confident that they will soon be able to do so. This hope adds an element of expectancy to memories and saves them from being mere recollections of a dead past.
Marcel Proust -
The moments of the past are not motionless; in our memory they retain the motion which precipitated them toward a future now likewise become the past.
Marcel Proust -
Your fondest dream is to humiliate the man who has insulted you. But if he moves far away and you never hear of him again, your enemy eventually ceases to have any importance to you.
Marcel Proust -
The places we have known do not belong simply to the world of space in which we locate them for our convenience. Originally each place was but a thin slice amidst adjacent impressions which formed our life at that time. The memory of a certain image is merely nostalgia for a certain moment, and houses, roads, avenues are fugitive, alas, like the years.
Marcel Proust -
“Our memory is like those shops which exhibit in their windows now one and now another photograph of the same person. And usually the most recent picture is the only one on view.”
- Marcel Proust
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What most effectively recalls a person to us is precisely what we had forgotten; because of its insignificance it has retained its original strength, unaltered by our thought.
Marcel Proust -
People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.
Marcel Proust (via realityintolerant) -
A little insomnia is a great help in understanding the nature of sleep, in projecting some light into that dark night. An infallible memory is not a very powerful stimulus to studying the phenomena of memory.
Marcel Proust -
In youth we longed to possess the heart of a woman we loved; later in life the realization that we possess a woman’s heart is enough to make us fall in love with her. By then we have already experienced love several times; it no longer develops according to its own mysterious and fatal laws, leaving our heart surprised and passive. We meet it halfway, hastening its progress by memory and suggestion. Upon recognizing one of its symptoms, we recall, we call forth, the others. Since we know its song, already engraved within us, a woman need not sing us the opening notes. If she begins in the middle— where the two hearts merge, where each exists only for the other— we know the music well enough to join our partner immediately at the note where she is expecting us.
Marcel Proust
