"Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath. You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down cautiously, as if with tongs, and wait suspended until the next one finds you: Ah yes, then this; and yes, praise be, then this."

Memory, Learning, Experience, Understanding

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"Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath. You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down cautiously, as if with tongs, and wait suspended until the next one finds you: Ah yes, then this; and yes, praise be, then this."

Exlpore more Memory quotes

"Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds."

Craig D. Lounsbrough, American Author

Memory, Truth, Wisdom, Inspirational

"Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her."

Jeanette Winterson, British Novelist

Memory, Understanding, Self, Isolation, Past

"Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead."

Jeanette Winterson, British Novelist

Memory, Past, Time, Narrative

"He lives vividly in her recollections, however, and his memory is etched on her soul."

Dean Koontz, American Author

Memory, Love, Soul, Emotion

"What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millenia opening in your gut. What is salted up in the memory of you? Memory past and memory future."

Jeanette Winterson, British Novelist

Memory, Time, Life, Truth

"Scent is the strongest tie to memory."

Maggie Stiefvater, American Author

Memory, Emotion, Past, Connection

"Some of my anger has faded, but it isn't hard to call back. All I have to do is think about how cold the air was and how loud the laughter was. Look at her. She's a child."

Veronica Roth, American Author

Memory, Anger, Cold, Laughter

"People never forget two things, their first love and the money they wasted watching a bad movie."

Amit Kalantri, Indian Author

Memory, Love, Money, Forget

"It's not that I can't remember. It's that I prefer not to remember, which means that I prefer not to remember what not remembering did to me the last time I did it."

Craig D. Lounsbrough, American Author

Memory, Truth, Power, Wisdom

"The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before."

John Green, American Author

Memory, Loss, Life, Emotion

Explore more quotes by Annie Dillard

"The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But- and this is the point- who gets excited by a mere penny? But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days."

Simplicity

"She reads books as one would breathe air,to fill up and live."

Education

"Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood."

Science

"Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit."

Awareness

"Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them."

Learning

"I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes."

Literature

"There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable."

Age

"Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home."

Nature

"A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time."

Time

"Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death."

Reflection