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Memory Quotes
"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."
30
"'Tis the last rose of summer Left blooming alone; All her lovely companions Are faded and gone."
30
"I wondered when I had forgotten that, despite everything, he was still just a child."
30
"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."
30
"The only way we can revive our memories, if we are willing to ponder about the events that was never discussed for years by looking back at old photos or written texts which gives us a clue about the event we are trying to recall about. If that strategy is accomplished, we will have a clear episodic memory about that particular event that we perceive it as very significant to us."
30
"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."
30
"Fortunately, I've also been an electrician, and that's a happy memory for me."
30
"The hurricane flooded me out of a lot of memorabilia, but it can't flood out the memories."
29
"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."
29
"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."
29
"I have been too young to know, and I have been too old to care. It's in that oh so narrow slice between that memories are made."
29
"No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself."
29
"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."
29
"Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them."
28
"Seeking to forget makes exile all the longer; the secret of redemption lies in remembrance."
28
"People have an annoying habit of remembering things they shouldn't."
28
"Coffee, she'd discovered, was tied to all sorts of memories, different for each person. Sunday mornings, friendly get - togethers, a favorite grandfather long since gone, the AA meeting that saved their life. Coffee meant something to people. Most found their lives were miserable without it. Coffee was a lot like love that way. And because Rachel believed in love, she believed in coffee, too."
28
"People say that time slips through our fingers like sand. What they don't acknowledge is that some of the sand sticks to the skin. These are the memories that will remain, memories of the time when there was still time left."
28
"Sometimes it's your fragrance that comes to me, out of the blue, on a crowded road in a Sunday afternoon.But more often, it's memories of us that cross my mind almost every lone evening.All I want is to lessen the pain I feel every night.But every morning I wake up is another day, hopeless and miserable, with nothing but a deafening silence, a wave of tears, memories and your absence."
28
"The issues and challenges surrounding nuclear non-proliferation are continuously evolving. They've changed dramatically at several junctures in recent memory."
28
"I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of the water, the chink of the dogs' leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother's dip - pen, the smell of the trees, the stillness. I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck. I wished a sleep would find us, at this absolute second, like sleep over the castle of sleeping beauty."
28
"Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense."
28
"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."
28
"I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That's why I want to write a book."
27
"When I need names they drop out of my head; when I don't need them they drop back."
27
"When love dies and marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light."
27
"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."
27
"It dances on the air for a moment before it falls, too. A fresh gust of wind almost saves it, but a worker catches sight of it and lifts a tube up to suck the paper from the air, to suck the words from the sky.I'm sorry, Grandfather."
26
"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."
26
"It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again."
26
"If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases hurting stays in the memory."
26
"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."
26
"Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We're so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about everyday, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone."
26
"What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible."
26
"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."
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