top of page
.png){kind=small}
Memory Quotes
"If genetic memory or racial memory persists, is it possible that individual memory also exists from previous lives?"
31
"The Jumble Shop would be one place where we'd sometimes accumulate down in the Village. I think it might be just a place that's unknown that was right around the corner from wherever it was that we met."
31
"Our sins are more easily remembered than our good deeds."
31
"If I never see you again I will always carry youinsideoutsideon my fingertipsand at brain edgesand in centerscentersof what I am ofwhat remains."
31
"I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces."
31
"Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is afterwards recalled to his mind's eye as she appeared in one particular scene, which seems ordained to be her special medium of manifestation throughout all the pages of his memory."
31
"She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter."
31
"When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance."
31
"A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial."
31
"Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it."
30
"He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch."
30
"History overflows time. Love overflows the allowance of the world. All the vessels overflow, and no end or limit stays put. Every shakable thing has got to be shaken. In a sense, nothing that was ever lost in Port William ever has been replaced. In another sense, nothing is ever lost, and we are compacted together forever, even by our failures, our regrets, and our longings."
30
"An addition that takes time to depart, and sometimes, never leaves at all. A smell, a touch, thoughts, moments, feelings, movements, words left unsaid, words barely spoken; they all have a distinct sense, distinct fragrances! .... A pungent of cinnamon, an aroma of a rose, a summer breeze, a sweet smile like a per-fume that lingers on and on... endlessly."
29
"Amintirea plăcerilor este mai durabilă și mai de încredere decât prezența lor.”
29
"Mandy smiled cheerfully at an overweight kid in a gold sweater and pink skirt who was chasing her little brother around along the boardwalk. When she was that age, on sunny days she'd be out on the boardwalk with Jud and Wendy, buying rainbow sorbet from the ice cream shop and placing paper boats into the harbour. She felt like a ghost, drifting past the shell of her own childhood."
29
"Maybe I have never had the Christmas I remember, since we never remember the event itself but just the last time we revisited the memory. I have woven together a few dozen scraps (the Sears catalog, my father videoing everything we did, Christmas parties and visits with Santa) and pretended they amount to one perfect, cohesive moment, but I am as guilty as baby-boomers, who dictated unconsciously that all the songs they listened to in 1963 would be the timeless Christmas standards of today."
29
"The streets looked small, of course. The streets that we have only seen as children always do I believe when we go back to them."
29
"Wouldn't you like to have an augmented memory chip that you could plug into your head so you don't have to look everything up and remember everything?"
28
"To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there."
28
"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me."
28
"Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are associative relations."
28
"You know, as you get older, the first thing you lose is memory. It seems to be happening with me."
28
"'Tis the last rose of summer Left blooming alone; All her lovely companions Are faded and gone."
28
"I was helped by having a verbatim memory of what happened years ago, even if I can't remember what happened a couple of days ago."
28
"My memory is good for some things and not others."
28
"No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself."
28
"Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board."
28
"A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen."
28
"Fortunately, I've also been an electrician, and that's a happy memory for me."
28
"This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that's gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea."
28
"Captain Harald Biscay rubbed his graying temples, staring deep in thought at the vast star field showing on the large navigation display on the bridge. It had been a pretty rough few days for him. Of all the things he'd seen in his travels through the universe, not many rated worthy of being remembered. Of the few examples of items Captain Biscay rated that highly, when he was a young man, his uncle would often play the bagpipes at strange hours of the night " shortly before being put in a 'home'. That rated a mention."
28
"But if you know that something has been really vicious, you don't read it, you don't let it into your head. What's damaging is when sentences go through your head and you burn with the injustice of it."
27
"Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story."
27
"Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter."
27
"I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence."
27
bottom of page