top of page
.png){kind=small}
Memory Quotes
"Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo. Macondo era entonces una aldea de veinte casas de barro y cañabrava construidas a la orilla de un río de aguas diáfanas que se precipitaban por un lecho de piedras pulidas, blancas y enormes como huevos prehistóricos. El mundo era tan reciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para mencionarlas había que señalarlas con el dedo."
11
"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."
11
"We'll start to forget a place once we left it."
11
"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."
11
"But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection."
10
"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?"
10
"I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974."
10
"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."
10
"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."
10
"You forget the life you had before, after awhile. Things you cherish and hold dear are like pearls on a string. Cut the knot and they scatter across the floor, rolling into dark corners never to be found again. So you move on, and eventually you forget what the pearls even looked like. At least, you try."
10
"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."
10
"What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."
10
"I was trying to figure out what a memory feels like."
10
"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."
10
"There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth."
10
"I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should not probably forget all about them."
10
"Nobody has ever taken a photograph of something they want to forget. We can build a wall of happy Kodak moments around ourselves, a wall of our Christmases, birthdays, baby showers and weddings, but we can never forget that celluloid film is see-through, that behind it, all the misery of real life waits for our wall to collapse someday."
10
"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."
10
"A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past according to his interest in the present."
10
"I can still memory - taste the fresh buttermilk pancakes and hot buttermilk biscuits - both made with lard! - that were cooked on the top, or in the oven, of that ancient iron stove."
9
"Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library."
9
"The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time."
9
"That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it."
9
"If genetic memory or racial memory persists, is it possible that individual memory also exists from previous lives?"
9
"The feelings resembled memories, but memories of what? Apparently one can remember things that have never happened."
9
"If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases hurting stays in the memory."
9
"There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted."
9
"He hasn't said whether he remembers the episode itself - or, if he doesn't, whether that is because it never happened or because it happened too often to keep track. More important, he hasn't said what he thinks about it all from the perspective of 2003."
9
"It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years? (asked Mr Ramsay ironically, staring at the hedge). What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare."
8
"I have forgotten my umbrella."
8
"Memory, in widow's weeds, with naked feet stands on a tombstone."
8
bottom of page