"In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart through a late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happiness than those golden afternoons, with the woody odor of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the insatiable lovers kidding on the open terraces, and still he had told himself with his hand on his heart that he was not prepared to exchange all that for a single instant of his Caribbean in April. He was still too young to know that heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombian Novelist

Memory, Love, Happiness, Nostalgia

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"In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart through a late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happiness than those golden afternoons, with the woody odor of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the insatiable lovers kidding on the open terraces, and still he had told himself with his hand on his heart that he was not prepared to exchange all that for a single instant of his Caribbean in April. He was still too young to know that heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past."

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 Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love."

Love

"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before."

Love

"The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die."

Grief

"The ferocity of Santiago Nasar's fate, which had collected twenty years of happiness from him not only with his death but also with the dismemberment of his body and its dispersion and extermination."

Fate

"During the luncheon he paid attention to no one except his own phantoms."

Solitude

"She was lost in her longing to understand."

Reflection

"That night in Cartagena he again requested the songs of his youth, some so old he had to teach them to Iturbide, who was too young to remember them. The audience slipped away as the General bled inside, and he was left alone with Iturbide beside the embers."

Nostalgia

"They were people whose lives were slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but who disappeared little by little in their own time, turning into memories, mists from other days, until they were absorbed into oblivion."

Transience

"At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death."

Reflection

"Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching."

Heartbreak