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Memory Quotes


"Let my memories of you be like water on the moon. A beautiful impossibility - but allowing me to sleep and dream of infinite beginnings rather than Othello endings."


"I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer -- and what trees and seasons smelled like -- how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich."


"Every word you've ever said, is written somewhere in my mind."


"But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shews us of the past preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray."


"She wondered if old dreams could haunt rooms - if, when one left forever the room where she had joyed and suffered and laughed and wept, something of her, intangible and invisible, yet nonetheless real, did not remain behind like a voiceful memory."


"The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines."


"Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it."


"She is no longer a person in his life; instead, she is a person that other people will remind him of."


"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."


"And despite the clamors and the violence, we tried to preserve in our hearts the memory of a happy sea, of a remembered hill, the smile of a beloved face."


"Your first words will outlive your conversations and impact how you are remembered, liked, or regarded. Wouldn't you enjoy opening conversations with ease and mutual recognition? The challenging part is that it can be . . . awkward!"


"Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?"


"But they held tighter to each other, past and present and future; flickering between an ancient hall in a mountain castle perched above Orynth, a bridge suspended between glass towers, and another place, perfect and strange, where they had been crafted from stardust and light. A wall of night knocked them back. But they could not be contained. The darkness paused for breath. They erupted."


"Scent is the strongest tie to memory."


"...many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased. I remember a man in Salinas who in his middle years traveled to Honolulu and back, and that journey continued for the rest of his life. We could watch him in his rocking chair on his front porch, his eyes squinted, half-closed, endlessly traveling to Honolulu."



"She has been to the compound before. She remembered this hallway. She knows about the initiation process. My mother was Dauntless."


"The most evocative life memories, which produced a synesthesia of emotions, consist of a host of small pleasures intertwined with the homespun stitches of love, affection, kindness, humility, and appreciation of nature."


"To forget is to render the pages of history as entirely blank, and the lessons of history as never taught."


"Our photographs are our best proof to others that we lived the things we lived in the past!"


"I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches."



"I slept that night in the room I used to have when I was a little boy, with the summer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing the smell of the ripe fields. I lay awake and watched the moonlight shining over the barn and the stacks and the pond, and the windmill making its old dark shadow against the blue sky."


"The town was paper, but the memories were not."


"There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision."



"The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait."


"One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one has given. One must have strong powers of imagination to be able to have pity. So closely is morality bound to the quality of the intellect."



"A song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in you or the world, that one song stays the same, just like that moment. Which is pretty amazing, when you actually think about it."


"Gone are the summer daysand my mind along with them.No longer will I indulgein hopes of getting you back.It is hope that makes these chains heavierand autumnal nights longer.I will merely serve as a memory to you:the lover that recited love poems.I must go nowand I urge you not to look back."


"You have merories?Lost somebody, which will mean he has died or something is going and you can't stop it the time eats so he dies...You lost a lot of choices??Did you...As far as I can tell, I think that I'm rich. I have one treasure and that's it, it's fill with such stuff."


"Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we're disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare, and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about."


"Can I dwell on what I scarce remember? I held a castle on the Marches once, and there was a woman I was pledged to marry, but I could not find that castle today, nor tell you the color of that woman's hair. Who knighted me, old friend? What were my favorite foods? It all fades. Sometimes I think I was born on the bloody grass in that grove of ash, with the taste of fire in my mouth and a hole in my chest. Are you my mother, Thoros?"


"What's broken is broken-and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I live I'm too old to believe in such sentimentalities as clean slates and starting all over."


"What I learn today I shall know forever. Whether or not I remember that I know it is a different story."


"Eric moved the broom experimentally and made an attempt to sweep the glass into the pan while it lay in the middle of the floor. Of course, the pan slid away. Eric scowled.I'd finally found something Eric did poorly."


"Some things are not supposed to be forgotten, these are the things which make us human."
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