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Memory Quotes
"When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf."
2
"Memories are never as true as the things one forgets."
2
"You remember some bedrooms you have slept in. There are bedrooms you like to remember and others you would like to forget."
2
"This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever and new ones have formed that have given birth to new sorrows and joys which I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones have been difficult for me to understand. It was a very long time ago, too, that my father ceased to be able to say to Mama, "Go with the boy. The possibility of such hours will never be reborn for me."
2
"When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too-leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been."
2
"Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?"
2
"Even now, whenever I think of her, I envision a quiet Sunday morning. A gentle, clear day, just getting under way. No homework to do, just a Sunday when you could do what you wanted. She always gave me this kick-back-and-relax, Sunday-morning kind of feeling."
2
"It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain."
2
"The past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as dA©cor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into."
2
"I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was."
2
"In a dancehall in Kendal, I chased the bouncers out of the fucking dancehall, they were wearing white coats and they took these coats off, put them on the floor and jacked; Ginger Harris and me, we put the white coats on and took over for the night!"
2
"But the windows of the house of Memory, and the windows of the house of Mercy, are not so easily closed as windows of glass and wood. They fly open unexpectedly; they rattle in the night; they must be nailed up. Mr. The Englishman had tried nailing them, but had not driven the nails quite home. So he passed but a disturbed evening and a worse night."
2
"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."
2
"I was a hip kid. When I saw Bambi it was the midnight show."
2
"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?"
2
"Whether it's something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday I must start out with an emotion, one that's close to me and that I can understand."
2
"The fire? It has been alive as long as I have. We talk and think together all night long. It's like a book to me " the only book I ever learned to read; and many an old story it tells me. It's music, for I should know its voice among a thousand, and there are other voices in its roar. It has its pictures too. You don't know how many strange faces and different scenes I trace in the red-hot coals. It's my memory, that fire, and shows me all my life."
2
"The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still with its unconscious or unheeding air;..."
2
"I may remember you, Scarlet, he bellowed, backing up when she grabbed her fork and held it out like a dagger. She'd murdered men with less. Even immortals. "But you haven't haunted me. Motions stiff, he raised his shirt. Amid the cuts, above his heart, was a tattoo of eyes. Dark eyes. Like hers. "Don't you see? You haven't haunted me.""
2
"Then he remembered his wedding, the old times, the first pregnancy of his wife; he, too, had been very happy the day when he had taken her from her father to his home, and had carried her off on a pillion, trotting through the snow, for it was near Christmas-time, and the country was all white. She held him by one arm, her basket hanging from the other; the wind blew the long lace of her Cauchois headdress so that it sometimes flapped across his mouth, and when he turned his head he saw near him, on his shoulder, her little rosy face, smiling silently under the gold bands of her cap. To warm her hands she put them from time to time in his breast. How long ago it all was! Their son would have been thirty by now. Then he looked back and saw nothing on the road."
2
"Beyond the late Fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the details of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then."
2
"For the rest of his life, Oliver Twist remembers a single word of blessing spoken to him by another child because this word stood out so strikingly from the consistent discouragement around him."
2
"In the coming days and weeks, Laila would scramble frantically to commit it all to memory, what happened next. Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could--a look, a whisper, a moan--to salvage from perishing to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all."
2
"Some details in life may look insignificant but appear to be vital leitmotifs in a person's life. They may have the value of "Rosebuds" of Citizen Kane or "Madeleine cookies" of Marcel Proust or "Strawberry fields" of the Beatles. People regularly walk down the memory lane of their early youth. The paper boats of their childhood are recurrently floating on the waves of their mind and bring back the mood and the spirit of the early days. They enable us to retreat from the trivial, daily worries and can generate delightful bliss and true joy in a sometimes frantic and chaotic life. ['Paper boats forever']"
2
"It was a mistake to think of houses, old houses, as being empty. They were filled with memories, with the faded echoes of voices. Drops of tears, drops of blood, the ring of laughter, the edge of tempers that had ebbed and flowed between the walls, into the walls, over the years.Wasn't it, after all, a kind of life?And there were houses, he knew it, that breathed. They carried in their wood and stone, their brick and mortar a kind of ego that was nearly, very nearly, human."
2
"I need to hold on to the faded love 'cause I love to secure the stems of dying flowers."
2
"All in all, it was a never-to-be-forgotten summer - one of those summers which come seldom into any life, but leave a rich heritage of beautiful memories in their going - one of those summers which, in a fortunate combination of delightful weather, delightful friends and delightful doing, come as near to perfection as anything can come in this world."
2
"That as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive."
2
"Losing you're co-remember meant losing the memory itself."
2
"Sometimes I accidentally walk into the places where I and you had spoken before, existed before, which still have the smell ofyour memories, all of a sudden it starts feeling like I have entered a dark room without a door anywhere. Where I can always hear that song I used to love once before."
2
"If there were no life beyond this earth-life, some people I have known would gain immortality by the nobility of our memory of them. With every friend I love who has been taken into the brown bosom of the earth a part of me has been buried there; but their contribution of happiness, strength, and understanding to my being remains to sustain me in an altered world."
2
"Unless we remember we cannot understand."
2
"Memory is the coherence of life, that possesses all your emotions, and ambitions. Without it, your joyous as well as agonizing experiences of life won't have any significance to you whatsoever."
2
"The Beatles were bubblegum cards and Help at the Saturday morning cinema and toy plastic guitars and singing 'Yellow Submarine' at the top of my voice in the back row of the coach on school trips. They belong to me, not to me and Laura, or me and Charlie, or me and Alison Ashworth, and though they'll make me feel something, they won't make me feel anything bad."
2
"Dickens writes that an event, "began to be forgotten, as most affairs are, when wonder, having no fresh food to support it, dies away of itself."
2
"My fear is that he'll forget me," she bemoaned with crystalline sadness. I took her hand, limp with loss and held it. "I'd rather not be remembered by any man as it saves me the embarrassment."
2
"He walked out into a different city, one that was perfumed by the last dahlias of June, and onto a street out of his youth, where the shadowy widowsfrom five o'clock Mass were filing by. But now it was he, not they, who crossed the street, so they would not see the tears he could no longer hold back, not his midnight tears, as he thought, but other tears: the ones he had been swallowing for fifty-one years, nine months and four days."
2
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