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Quotation from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
“the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”
Swann's Way, Overture (the madeleine), trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1922)
After recognizing the taste of the madeleine Aunt Léonie used to give him, the narrator reflects on why taste and smell outlast every other trace of the past.
Citation: "the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection." — Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, Overture (the madeleine), trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1922). (id proust-swanns-way-q3)
Portrait: Marcel Proust 1895, Otto Wegener, Public domain.
