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Memory Quotes
"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be."
25
"If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today."
25
"Sometimes we look back and 10 years from now we think, 'Boy, those were great old days.' Well, you know, we're living in the good old days."
25
"Man must learn that his current path is not suitable for Earth, and soon, Earth won't be suitable for Man."
25
"The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting."
25
"You're always making up stuff from the past, she said. "And the stuff you imagine is always better than the stuff that actually happened."
25
"Sometimes John had recorded new compositions, or lines from his new poems. Sometimes he'd just record a busy night in The Green Man. Sometimes sheep, seals, skylarks, the wind turbine. If Liam were home there would be some Liam. The summer fair. The Fastnet Race. I would unfold my map of Clear Island. Those tapes prised the lid off homesickness and rattled out the contents, but always at the bottom was solace."
25
"There are three things I always forget. Names, faces and... the third I can't remember."
24
"It occurs to me that I really can't remember your face in any precise detail. Only the way you walked away through the tables in the café, your figure, your dress, that I still see."
24
"The majority of people dismiss those things that lie beyond the bounds of their own understanding as absurd and not worth thinking about. I myself can only wish that my stories were, indeed, nothing but incredible fabrications. I have stayed alive all these years clinging to the frail hope that these memories of mine were nothing but a dream or a delusion. I have struggled to convince myself that they never happened. But each time I tried to push them into the dark, they came back stronger and more vivid than ever. Like cancer cells, these memories have taken root in my mind and eaten into my flesh."
24
"Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant-so that he constantly called different things by that name-but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of 'pain'-in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism."
24
"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."
23
"Even painful memories are ties that bind."
23
"These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality."
23
"In fact, ' Eric said, as he went to the front door, 'I'd throw it away entirely. Maybe burn it.'He left, closing the door behind him very quietly.I knew, as sure as I knew my name, that tomorrow he would send me another coat, in a big fancy box, with a big bow on it. It would be the right size, it would be a top brand, and it would be warm.It was cranberry red, with a removable liner, a detachable hood and tortoiseshell buttons."
23
"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."
23
"There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted."
23
"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."
22
"I have forgotten my umbrella."
22
"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."
22
"In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart through a late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happiness than those golden afternoons, with the woody odor of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the insatiable lovers kidding on the open terraces, and still he had told himself with his hand on his heart that he was not prepared to exchange all that for a single instant of his Caribbean in April. He was still too young to know that heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past."
22
"The feelings resembled memories, but memories of what? Apparently one can remember things that have never happened."
22
"But I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland."
22
"Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure."
22
"You dont have to hold on to the pain, to hold on to the memory."
21
"I held a jewel in my fingers And went to sleep. The day was warm, and winds were prosy; I said: "'T will keep."I woke and chid my honest fingers,-The gem was gone; And now an amethyst remembrance Is all I own."
21
"It is said that nothing in our lives is ever lost, that nothing can prevent its having been. That is why, so very often the weight of the past lies ineluctably upon the present. But that is why it is so real in memory, so wholly itself, so far beyond replacement."
21
"The Beatles were bubblegum cards and Help at the Saturday morning cinema and toy plastic guitars and singing 'Yellow Submarine' at the top of my voice in the back row of the coach on school trips. They belong to me, not to me and Laura, or me and Charlie, or me and Alison Ashworth, and though they'll make me feel something, they won't make me feel anything bad."
21
"Everyone has a photographic Memory, some just don't have film."
21
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