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Memory Quotes
"I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn't think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory - recalled only on the anniversary of her death, or maybe a couple of weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten."
14
"Isn't it weird? The way you remember things when it's gone."
14
"Nothing stands out so conspicuously, or remains so firmly fixed in the memory, as something which you have blundered."
14
"Something weird moved through me, a feeling of familiarity, and as I stood in front of my locker, I found myself thinking of the one bright thing in a past full of shadows and darkness.I thought about the boy who made my chest hurt, the one who'd promised forever.It had been four years since I'd seen him or even heard him speak. Four years of trying to erase everything that had to do with that portion of my childhood, but I remembered him. I wondered about him.How could I not? I always would.He had been the sole reason I survived the house we'd grown up in."
14
"All I'd ever wanted was to forget. but even when I thought I had, pieces had kept emerging, like bits of wood floating up to the surface that only hint at the shipwreck below."
14
"No person is more ruthlessly cheated than someone strip-mined of his or her ability to recall the vibrancy of the past. After all, what would any person be if robbed of all sense of long-term memory? Without memories, all that any person would know about life is if he or she was hungry or thirsty, cold or hot. Without memories of the past and shredded of any illusion of a future there cannot be a frame for our existence. Without a sense of memory, we lack cognition of the very essence of our being. In absence of our memories, there can be no introspection, no ethical awareness, and no devotion, loyalty, or love."
14
"Man's memory shapesIts own Eden within."
14
"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."
14
"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?"
14
"Nothing's ever gone. We fool ourselves that things fade, but they never do."
14
"How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet."
14
"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;..."
14
"He noticed that she threw away the crumbled bus ticket on the street as soon as she got down. He picked it up and put it in his pocket along with his own a memorabilia of their first date together, just like a strand of her hair he would find later on his shirt and the broken pen cap that she would go on to search in the laboratory and so many other such small things which he would collect."
14
"The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past."
14
"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."
14
"The vivid memory of the woods had blossomed into a visceral longing for the Ridge, so immediate that I felt the ghost of my vanished house rise around me, a cold mountain wind thrumming past its walls, and thought that, if I reached down, I could feel Adso's soft gray fur under my fingers. I swallowed, hard."
14
"August used to be a sad month for me. As the days went on, the thought of school starting weighed heavily upon my young frame. That, coupled with the oppressive heat and humidity of my native Washington, D.C., only seemed to heighten the misery."
14
"They were ready to sell people a future in exchange for their past... They wanted to compel him to cast his life away and become a shadow, a man without past, an actor without a role, and turn even his castaway life, even the role the actor had abandoned, into a shadow. Having turned him into a shadow, they would let him live."
14
"Ellington Feint was a line in my mind running right down the middle of my life, separating the formal training of my childhood and the territory of the rest of my days. She was an axis, and at that moment and for many moments afterward, my entire world revolved around her."
14
"[In] everyday life, it is very rare that we are confronted with new facts about events of long ago. Our memories are almost never challenged. They can, instead, be frozen in place, no matter how flawed they are, or become a work in continual artistic revision."
14
"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."
14
"You walk and walk and walk and then you look at back and see your youth, so far away from you, so young, so curious, so hopeful, so breezy, so brave! To feel young in old age, remember your youth very often! Remind yourself frequently what you were once!"
14
"He told me that the phrase "the happiest days of your life referred to your school days.This seemed nonsensical to me then, and I suspected it of being either adult propaganda or, more likely, confirmation of my creeping suspicion that the majority of adults actually had no memories of being children."
14
"My memories always clutch my brain to understand the past."
14
"In our time together, you claimed a special place in my heart, one I'll carry with me forever and that no one can ever replace."
14
"I know nothing about her. Just some books, and some stories she tried to tell me, and things I didn't understand, and I remember big red soft hands and that smell. I never knew who she really was. I mean, she must have been nine too, once."
14
"And the worst thing about it was that you began to feel as if you had always lived on that ship, in that darkness, and to wonder whether sun and blue skies and wind and birds had not been only a dream."
14
"Oh well, memories, said I. Yes, even remembering in itself is sad, yet how much more its object! Don't let yourself in for things like that, it's not for you and not for me. It only weakens one's present position without strengthening the former one - nothing is more obvious - quite apart from the fact that the former one doesn't need strengthening."
13
"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."
13
"Memories of that which we have lost are curious things - weeks, months, even years may pass without recollection of them and then, quite suddenly, something will remind us of a lost friend, or of a favourite possession that has been mislaid or destroyed, and then we think: Yes, that is what I have had and I have no longer."
13
"They sped by a pack of sea lions lounging on the docks, and she swore she saw an old homeless guy sitting among them. From across the water the old man pointed a bony finger at Percy and mouthed something like 'Don't even think about it.'"Did you see that?" Hazel asked. Percy's face was red in the sunset. "Yeah. I've been here before. I...I don't know. I think I was looking for my girlfriend.""Annabeth," Frank said. "You mean, on your way to Camp Jupiter?"Percy frowned. "No. Before that."
13
"Photos're better than nothing, but things're better than photos 'cause the things themselves were part of what was there."
13
"You're bigger than I remember," she said stupidly."You too," he said. "I also remember that you were beautiful.""Memory does play tricks on us.""No. Your face is the same, but I don't remember what beautiful means anymore. Come on. Let's go out into the lake."
13
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