Quotes About Memory

Amava-a, lamentava não ter tido tempo nem a inspiração de ofendê-la, de fazer-lhe mal, de forçá-la a se lembrar de mim. Achava-a tão linda que desejaria retroceder para gritar-lhe, erguendo os ombros: "Como a acho feia, ridícula, como você me repugna".

I needed to live with the idea of the death of Albertine, with the idea of her misdeeds, for these ideas to become habitual, that is for me to be able to forget these ideas and finally forget Albertine herself.

All the more because situations, while repeating them

The most gifted people that I had known had died young.

whether one day "Guermantes" itself may survive as anything other than a place-name, except to archaeologists who stop briefly in Combray,

And certainly there were many others besides my grandmother and Albertine from whom I had assimilated a word, a glance, but of whom as individual beings I remembered nothing; a book is a great cemetery in which, for the most part, the names upon the tombs are effaced. Sometimes, on the other hand,

partiellement revêtue d'acajou, où, dès la première

But never again would I be able to erase that contraction from her face, or that suffering from her heart, or, rather, from my own; for, since the dead exist only in us, it is ourselves that we strike unrelentingly when we persist in remembering the blows we have dealt them. I clung to these sorrows, however cruel they might be, with all my strength, for I felt that they were the effect of my memory of my grandmother, the proof that this memory which I had was indeed present in me.

The person that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man whom I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.

the memory of a certain image is only regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.

It's no more obsolete than the Iliad. I may

Now the memories of love are no exception to the general laws of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general laws of Habit.

Of course things have no power in themselves and since it is we who impart it to them, some middle-class school-boy might at this moment be standing in front of the mansion in the Avenue du Bois and feeling as I did formerly about the earlier one. And this because he would still be at the age of faith which I had left far behind;

A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.

The dead last so short a time … Alas, in the coffin they crumble into dust, Less quickly than in our hearts!

We can remember the truth because it bears a name, has roots in the past, but an improvised lie is quickly forgotten.

as those old engravings of the 'Cenacolo,' or that painting by Gentile Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in which they no longer exist, the masterpiece of Leonardo and the portico of Saint Mark's. We

The only true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

my body ... faithful guardian of a past which my mind should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes ....

it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.

To anything that we do not know to be related to the real life of the person whom we love we pay but scant attention, we forget immediately what she has said to us about some incident or people that we do not know, and her expression while she was saying it.

could still believe in their possible presence; for memory was now set in motion;

seemed to proclaim the unpeopled vacancy of this estranged forest, and helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed.

28. Comment j'aimerais mourir. — Meilleur et aimé. 29. État présent de mon