“No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman's bonnet whether she has got a memory or not.”

“It was all very well being in love with the memory of a woman, but loving a woman without her memories was simply torture.”

“love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory”

“Love begins with a metaphor. Love begins at a point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”

“Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”

“It is the wicked deception of love that it begins by making us dwell not upon a woman in the outside world but upon a doll inside our head, the only woman who is always available in fact, the only one we shall ever possess, whom the arbitrary nature of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the real Balbec had been from the Balbec I imagined- a dummy creation that little by little, to our own detriment, we shall force the real woman to resemble.”