Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years. And great fatigue followed by a good night's rest can to a certain extent help us to do so. For in order to make us descend into the most subterranean galleries of sleep, where no reflexion from overnight, no gleam of memory comes to light up the interior monologue–if the latter does not itself cease–fatigue followed by rest will so thoroughly turn over the soil and penetrate the bedrock of our bodies that we discover down there, where our muscles plunge and twist in their ramifications and breathe in new life, the garden where we played in our childhood. There is no need to travel in order to see it again; we must dig down inwardly to discover it. What once covered the earth is no longer above but beneath it; a mere excursion does not suffice for a visit to the dead city: excavation is necessary also. But we shall see how certain fugitive and fortuitous impressions carry us back even more effectively to the past, with a more delicate precision, with a more light-winged, more immaterial, more headlong, more unerring, more immortal flight, than these organic dislocations. Marcel Proust
Some Similar Quotes
  1. I think it is all a matter of love the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes - Vladimir Nabokov

  2. One lives in the hope of becoming a memory. - Antonio Porchia

  3. There are two ways to live a life either forget everything or, remember nothing. - Santosh Kalwar

  4. It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory - Paulo Coelho

  5. Because in some other universe, you are me, I am you, and we are perfectly happy together. Or perhaps not… and just like this… - Abhimanyu Jha

More Quotes By Marcel Proust
  1. Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

  2. Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days...

  3. My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.

  4. People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura oflife which bears no relation to true immortality but through which theycontinue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. Itis as though they were...

  5. One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.

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