Howard Moss > Quotes

“Habit enables us to cling to the familiar, to the self we think we know with a persistence almost irresistible. An anodyne for the terror of the unknown, it effectively keeps us from knowing, and is fatal in itself. Habit is a fiction the organism requires to dim perception. It screens us from the world, and from the true world of the self. Habit—no matter how intense the suffering it causes—is the last thing the personality will give up. It is arming itself against danger. The weapons may be more painful to use than the pain they seek to deflect. No matter. Habit allows us to live—by which Proust means it allows us to exist while it simultaneously compels us to miss Life.”
― Howard Moss , Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust: A Critical Study of Remembrance of Things Past

“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, Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust: A Critical Study of Remembrance of Things Past

“The mind flies out to objects of its love
And finds impenetrable forms and shapes
That you can formulate when you pin down
Each butterfly of thought upon your board.

from “Letter to an Imaginary Brazil”
― Howard Moss, New Selected Poems

“Personality is by nature incongruous, being a product of time. Time, at any given moment, tends to obscure this.”
― Howard Moss, The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust: A Critical Study of Remembrance of Things Past