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"It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he's lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he's forgotten so much, what have I forgotten?"
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"She has been to the compound before. She remembered this hallway. She knows about the initiation process. My mother was Dauntless."

"Fortunately, I've also been an electrician, and that's a happy memory for me."

"I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys: the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain evening sky, Marie's dresses and the way she laughed."

"Things come into your memory even when you don't want them to, that is because 'pratikraman dosh' is pending (mistake for which pratikraman was not done yet)."

"It struck her how sad it was that all of them had grown up on top of one another like small animals in a too-small cage, and now would simply scatter. And that would be the end of that. Everything that had happened would be sucked away into memory and vapour, as though it hadn't even happened at all."

"Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's."

"I want to take all our best moments, put them in a jar, and take them out like cookies and savor each one of them forever."

"Filled her memory bank with shiny coins."
Explore more quotes by Margaret Atwood

"With shrunken fingerswe ate our oranges and bread,shivering in the parked car;though we know we had neverbeen there before,we knew we had been there before."

"And if I talk to him, I'll say something wrong, give something away. I can feel it coming, a betrayal of myself."

"Her face is silting up, like a pond; layers are accumulating. Every once in a while, when she can afford the time, she spends a few days at a spa north of the city, drinking vegetable juice and having ultrasound treatments, in search of her original face, the one she knows is under there somewhere; she comes back feeling toned up and virtuous, and hungry."

"How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste."

"If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too. Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn't work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude."

"One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?"

"There were places you didn't want to walk, precautions you took that had to do with locks on windows and doors, drawing the curtains, leaving on lights. These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive."

"I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not."

"The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love."
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