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Memory Quotes
"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."
23
"A Latin teacher told me I might make a good actress, and that stuck in my memory. I did some modeling, and Polanski gave me that small part."
23
"The headline is the most important element of an ad. It must offer a promise to the reader of a believable benefit. And it must be phrased in a way to give it memory value."
23
"She had learnt a painful lesson, she thought " that as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow."
23
"A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen."
23
"I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some thins you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still here. If a house burns down, it's done, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or know, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened."
23
"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."
23
"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."
23
"To him it is an ocean, unfathomable, and without a shore."
22
"What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed."
22
"A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind's eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own " a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets."
22
"The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around."
22
"That's why he was here, to surrender himself to longing, to listen to his host recite the anecdotal texts, all the passed-down stories of bonehead plays and swirling brawls, the pitching duels that carried into twilight, stories that Marvin had been collecting for half a century--the deep eros of memory that separates baseball from other sports."
22
"Better to leave him with the memory of their being a pair of monsters, wrapped in each other's arms."
22
"My memory of the school building itself, its rooms and lockers, blackboards, and hallways, bring on a heavy, oppressive feeling. Whether I was more unhappy in school than any of my friends I don't know. I never would have said I didn't like school, and there are moments I distinctly remember enjoying, but these truths don't alter my memory of that place."
22
"There are three things I always forget. Names, faces and... the third I can't remember."
21
"I should be proud to have my memory graced, but only if the monument be placed... here, where I endured three hundred hours in line before the implacable iron bars."
21
"To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there."
21
"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."
21
"I was trying to figure out what a memory feels like."
21
"I wanted to have virtual memory, at least as it's coupled with file systems."
21
"But that's how memory works," Bitterblue said quietly. "Things disappear without your permission, then come back again without your permission." And sometimes they came back incomplete and warped."
21
"I have not yet tranquillised myself enough to see Frederica."
21
"Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense."
21
"When I need names they drop out of my head; when I don't need them they drop back."
20
"Remembering the past always comes with an image or a view attached."
20
"Even if you only counted the votes that actually made it through the hoops in order to be cast, the president was really Al Gore."
20
"Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words."
20
"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."
20
"Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one's eyes, of the various events of one's life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables ones to resuscitate dead recollections, but even then, there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain for ever unverifiable."
20
"Gone - glimmering through the dream of things that were."
20
"I tried turning my back on all this, but it is inside me. Like when I was little and you read me that story of the girl who hated footprints and shadows, so she tried to run away from both. But her shadow was always there, and she only made more footprints by running."
20
"This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that's gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea."
20
"Looking at the elementary schoolers in their colorful T-shirts from various day camps, Percy felt a twinge of sadness. He should be at Camp Half-Blood right now, settling into his cabin for the summer, teaching sword-fighting lessons in the arena, playing pranks on the other counselors. These kids had no idea just how crazy a summer camp could be."
19
"Seeking to forget makes exile all the longer; the secret of redemption lies in remembrance."
19
"I've had more than 12,000 emails from the United States. It's not easy in the United States to find out the email address of a British parliamentarian."
19
"Dawn cackles as she guides me through the all-glass porch. Thinner, paler Reina shuffles about behind Dawn, watching as I slip my boots off. Although she tries to hide her hands, her fingers flicker nervously. I place my boots neatly on the floor of the porch beside the other pairs in the shadows under the coats. Music drifts through to us from a distant room " it's the Beach Boys' California Dreamin'. Dawn looks at me and I smile " they've put the record on for me. Dawn nods along happily. 'Hear you're a surfer boy!' she says and she mimics riding a wave."
19
"People have an annoying habit of remembering things they shouldn't."
19
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