Life & Mortality Quote by Marcel Proust

Proust’s sting here is that grief isn’t the main culprit; entropy is. He refuses the comforting story that love fades because the beloved is absent, as if distance alone could erode devotion. Instead, he pins the blame on the mourner’s own slow exit from the world. Affection thins not from betrayal but from depletion: less time, less attention, less sensory bandwidth to keep the dead vividly present.

The line works because it flips the moral valence of forgetting. We tend to treat fading memory as a failure of loyalty, a private scandal. Proust recasts it as biology and temporality doing their job. “We ourselves are dying” isn’t melodrama; it’s a diagnosis of how the self narrows under the pressure of time. The dead don’t change, but the living do: routines calcify, new desires crowd out old sorrows, energy gets rerouted toward the immediate. Forgetting becomes less a choice than a symptom.

Context matters: Proust wrote from the long interior corridor of illness, insomnia, and hyper-attentive recollection that powers In Search of Lost Time. His larger project is to show how memory is both tyrant and mirage, triggered by accidents (a taste, a texture) rather than summoned by will. This sentence turns that philosophy into a brutal consolation: if your love is fading, it may not mean the love was small. It may mean you are, quite literally, running out of life to spend on it.