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Memory Quotes
"These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device - a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle, I could collect a number. But whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past."
5
"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."
5
"But it is growing damp and I must go in. Memory's fog is rising."
5
"The last thing I remember ia an exquisitely beautiful green and silver moth landing on the curve of my wrist. The sound of rain on the roof of our house gently pulls me toward consciousness. I fight to return to sleep though, wrapped in a warm cocoon of blankets, safe at home. I'm vaguely aware that my head aches. Possibly I have the flu and this is why I'm allowed to stay in bed, even though I can tell I've been asleep a long time. My mother's hand strokes my cheek and I don't push is away as I would in wakefulness, never wanting her to know how much I crave that gentle touch. How much I miss her even though I still don't trust her. Then there's a voice, the wrong voice, not my mother's and i'm scared."
5
"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."
5
"Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely."
5
"Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters."
5
"When I was younger I could remember anything whether it had happened or not."
5
"Oh, oh, oh being a soldier... I remember that day... and that time.. and some moments.. I am still confused... as a soldier you could kill first somebody without a reason with soldier way string from piano... as a second... we use codes likePanda on Black... Black and white... Over the Game... Game the Shit... and many others what do they mean!?!?- Ohhhhh... you don't want to know, do ya???"
4
"But we do not need to recount every sermon and eulogy. After all, you were there."
4
"Now,Because I put you in the past,My life is like:A path paved,Fit for your feet.Now other women walk on it;And not one of them fits.Walking crooked, on a path that's straight.I watch them.They don't even have your gait."
4
"Valuables. That was a hot one, Richards thought, unbuttoning his shirt. He had an empty wallet with a few pictures of Sheila and Cathy, a receipt for a shoe sole he had replaced at the local cobbler's six months ago, a keyring with no keys on it except for the doorkey, a baby sock that he did not remember putting in there, and the package of Blams he had gotten from the machine."
4
"Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything."
4
"Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them."
4
"MY GOD!' read Monte Cristo, 'LET ME KEEP MY MEMORY!"
4
"She wondered if old dreams could haunt rooms - if, when one left forever the room where she had joyed and suffered and laughed and wept, something of her, intangible and invisible, yet nonetheless real, did not remain behind like a voiceful memory."
4
"A kind of memory that tells usthat what we're now striving for was oncenearer and truer and attached to uswith infinite tenderness. Here all is distance,there it was breath. After the first homethe second one seems draughty and strangely sexed."
4
"Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was."
4
"Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it."
4
"Sara," I ask finally, "what do you want from me?""I want to look at you and remember what it used to be like," she says thickly. "I want to go back, Brian. I want you to take me back."But she is not the woman I used to know, the woman who traveled a countryside counting prairie dog holes, who read aloud the classifieds of lonely cowboys seeking women and told me, in the darkest crease of the night, that she would love me until the moon lost its footing in the sky.To be fair, I am not the same man. The one who listened. The one who believed her."
4
"But memory is less disposed to compromise."
4
"How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet."
4
"Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own."
4
"She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do."
4
"He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us."
4
"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."
4
"I shook again, tasted plum, and suddenly the words were pouring out of me."She said I sang before I spoke. She said when I was just a baby she had the habit of humming when she held me. Nothing like a song. Just a descending third. Just a soothing sound. Then one day she was walking me around the camp, and she heard me echo it back to her. Two octaves higher. A tiny piping third. She said it was my first song. We sang it back and forth to each other. For years."I choked and clenched my teeth."You can say it,"Auri said softly."It's okay if you say it.""I'm never going to see her again,"I choked out. Then I began to cry in earnest."It's okay,"Auri said softly."I'm here. You're safe."
4
"The best part, though, was hearing my mother's voice. It was like having her again, coming out from far inside me. It hurt, of course, but more often than not the best things do, I've found. You wouldn't think it could be so, but-as the oldtimers used to say - the world's titled, and there's an end to it."
4
"You walk and walk and walk and then you look at back and see your youth, so far away from you, so young, so curious, so hopeful, so breezy, so brave! To feel young in old age, remember your youth very often! Remind yourself frequently what you were once!"
4
"He told me that the phrase "the happiest days of your life referred to your school days.This seemed nonsensical to me then, and I suspected it of being either adult propaganda or, more likely, confirmation of my creeping suspicion that the majority of adults actually had no memories of being children."
4
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