Proust Time Regained Quotes & Sayings

It has been said that the world of Proust was a world without a god. If that is true, it is not because God is
never spoken of, but because the ambition of this world is to be absolute perfection and to give to eternity
the aspect of man. Time Regained, at least in its aspirations, is eternity without God. Proust's work, in this
regard, appears to be one of the most ambitious and most significant of man's enterprises against his
mortal condition. He has demonstrated that the art of the novel can reconstruct creation itself, in the form
that it is imposed on us and in the form in which we reject it. In one of its aspects, at least, this art consists
in choosing the creature in preference to his creator. But still more profoundly, it is allied
to the beauty of the world or of its inhabitants against the powers of death and oblivion. It is in this way
that his rebellion is creative — Albert Camus

The enchantments of the past must always become the disenchantments of the future. But memory, a preservative, may intervene. The embalmer of original enchantments, it is the only human faculty that can outwit the advance of chronological time. Art, the embalmer of memory, is the only human vocation in which the time regained by memory can be permanently fixed. — Howard Moss

For neither our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength
we are able in the end both to dominate the first and to achieve the second. — Marcel Proust

And, without question, all those different planes, upon which Time, since I had regained it at this reception, had exhibited my life, by reminding me that in a book which gave the history of one, it would be necessary to make use of a sort of spatial psychology as opposed to the usual flat psychology, added a new beauty to the resurrections my memory was operating during my solitary reflections in the library, since memory, by introducing the past into the present without modification, as though it were the present, eliminates precisely that great Time-dimension in accordance with which life is realised. — Marcel Proust