Quotes About Memory

The problem with people is that for us they are no more than prints in our mental museum, which fade on exposure. And it is precisely because of this that they form the basis of projects illuminated by our thoughts, but thoughts tire and memories collapse: the day would come when I would happily give Albertine's room to the first girl who wanted it, as I had given Albertine the agate marble or other gifts of Gilberte's.

It is as if the minds of people of action, and smart people are people of action (on a minuscule, microscopic scale, but still action), are so consumed by attention to what will be happening in an hour's time that they commit very little to memory.

I told Morel, thinking to interest him, that M. de Norpois was a friend of my father. But not a movement of his features shewed that he had heard me, so little did he think of my parents, so far short did they fall in his estimation of what my great-uncle had been, who had employed Morel's father as his valet, and, as a matter of fact, being, unlike the rest of the family, fond of not giving trouble, had left a golden memory among his servants

Those years of my earliest childhood are no longer a part of myself; they are external to me; I can learn nothing of them save as we learn things that happened before we were born — from the accounts given me by other people.

all those other pleasures in the thick of which my imagination had enwrapped

Marcel Proust

Une œuvre est à la fois le souvenir de nos amours passées et la prophétie de nos amours nouvelles

With any one member of my little gang of girls, was I not bound to recall only the most recently glimpsed of her possible faces, given that the mind eliminates from our memories of anyone whatever does not contribute in an immediately useful way to our daily dealings with the person, even if—especially if!—these dealings are colored by a tincture of love, which, by being perpetually unsatisfied, lives forever in the coming moment?

O olhar de Robert, com efeito, parecia por momentos atingir uma profundidade que abandonava em seguida, como um mergulhador que tocou o fundo. Esse fundo, que tanto mal fazia a Robert quando o tocava que ele o deixava imediatamente para voltar um instante depois, era a lembrança de que havia rompido com a sua amante.

Albertine would in any case either not have given me any answer or else a "no" in which the "n" would have been too hesitant and the "o" too resonant. Albertine never recounted facts that might harm her,

But what we call experience is only the revelation to our own eyes of one of our own character traits, which recurs naturally, and recurs all the more powerfully if we have already on some previous occasion brought it up into the clear light of consciousness, so that the spontaneous reaction which had guided us the first time becomes reinforced by all the suggestions of memory.

Com os prazeres, dá-se o mesmo que com as fotografias. O que apanhamos na presença da criatura amada não passa de um negativo; revelamo-lo mais tarde, uma vez em casa, quando encontramos à nossa disposição essa câmara escura interior cuja entrada é proibida enquanto há gente à vista.

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.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

Probably what is wanting, the first time, is not comprehension but memory.

it was like what used to be called a panopticon but a panopticon of years, a view not of a monument but of a person situated in the modifying perspective of Time.

The only true paradise is a paradise lost

It seems that events extend further than the moments in which they happen, and cannot be completely contained within them. Certainly, they spill over into the future through the memories we retain of them, but they also demand space in the time that precedes them. Certainly you will say that at that time we do not see them as they will actually be, but are they not also changed in our memory of them?

And once again I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy), immediately the old gray house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater.

So that we always see as young those we knew young and those whom we knew as old people we embellish retrospectively with the virtues of old age,

Ponchour, Matame la marquise » avec le même accent qu'un concierge alsacien.

A grande modificação que provoca em nós o despertar consiste menos em introduzir-nos na vida clara da consciência que em fazer-nos perder a lembrança da luz um pouco mais tamisada em que repousava a nossa inteligência, como no fundo opalino das águas.

Unutu?, görevini yerine getirmiyor de?ildi, ama ayn? zamanda özlenen görüntünün ülküselle?tirilmesine ve dolay?s?yla, ilk andaki ac?n?n onu peki?tiren benzer ac?larla bütünle?tirilmesine katk?da bulunuyordu.

Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust. But so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lighted, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which has vanished even the memory of the darkness.