memory

Voluntary memory, which is above all the memory of the intelligence end of the eyes, gives us only the surface of the past without the truth, but when an odor, a taste, rediscovered under entirely different circumstances evoke for us, in spite of ourselves, the past, we sense how different is this past from the one we thought we remembered and which our voluntary memory was painting like a bad painter using false colors.

-- Proust, Marcel "Letters of Marcel Proust", translated by Mina Curtiss, Random House, New York, 1949, edition Helen Marx Books, 2006, pages 272-3