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Memory Quotes
"Dates are hard to remember because they consist of figures; figures are monotonously unstriking in appearance, and they don't take hold, they form no pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to help. Pictures are the thing. Pictures can make dates stick."
18
"The Screamingflashed me back to a timewhen mom and dad were still togetherif you could call miles apart together."
18
"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."
18
"Memory, in widow's weeds, with naked feet stands on a tombstone."
18
"She didn't watch the dead, ancient bone-chess cities slide under, or the old canals filled with emptiness and dreams. Past dry rivers and dry lakes they flew, like a shadow of the moon, like a torch burning."
18
"This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever and new ones have formed that have given birth to new sorrows and joys which I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones have been difficult for me to understand. It was a very long time ago, too, that my father ceased to be able to say to Mama, "Go with the boy. The possibility of such hours will never be reborn for me."
18
"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."
18
"Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's."
18
"I was a hip kid. When I saw Bambi it was the midnight show."
18
"It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he's lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he's forgotten so much, what have I forgotten?"
18
"But memory is less disposed to compromise."
18
"It seems that the people who come into our lives and stay for the briefest amount of time have the greatest impact upon us. Time may change some things, but not all things. Each day brings me closer to him, and the age in which he passed from this world into the next, but I still fight the urge, on rare occasions, to pick up the phone and dial his number, which I still remember. It's decades later, but that last meal we shared, laughing and smiling at each other from across the table, lost in harmony, seems but yesterday. Then there was the last lingering look and the final wave goodbye."
18
"But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, on the ruin of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory."
18
"Certain details, somewhat curtailed, live in my memory. But I don't see anything anymore: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction."
18
"But it is growing damp and I must go in. Memory's fog is rising."
18
"Old stories are like old friends (...) you have to visit them from time to time."
18
"We, as women, have this slight flaw. Yes, admitting it, we are flawed with a faultless memory in regards to the good and bad in men...Stored within our memory banks is every loving gesture and sugar coated word, thoughtful moments, places, arguments, indiscretions, lies all catalogued, timed and dated...The list, for us, is endless...It is not our fault...You give us so much to remember..."
18
"Every ounce of his soul tells him this will make a good story to tell his friends-an anecdote in the biography, an incident in the life. But part of the sorrow he feels-and it is that-comes from the distance he sees between himself and the storytelling, the hole that has ripped open between the here and the there."
18
"To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting."
18
"Too much time will do that to you. Blur the edges between your memories and your imagination until everything feels like something you saw in a movie instead of your life."
17
"Cole," I said, "Don't lose this number."
17
"I imagine the feelings of two people meeting after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That's where the misunderstanding starts: they don't, have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don't intersect."
17
"To Fred, those years seemed to pass like quickly skimming a book and then finding the ending wasn't what he expected. He wished he'd paid more attention to the story."
17
"Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory."
17
"Daily life is an ongoing adaptation process of imprinting our memory's storage center with useful data and the ceaseless expurgation of undesirable facts, exfoliation of destructive thoughts, and weeding out annoying emotional quirks that seemingly sprout out of thin air."
17
"I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and wrong."
17
"A question wells up inside me, a question so big it blocks my throat and makes it hard to breathe. Somehow I swallow it back, finally choosing another. "Are memories such an important thing?""It depends," she replies, and closes her eyes. "In some cases, they're the most important thing there is."
17
"Because who can describe the look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death?"
17
"You remember some bedrooms you have slept in. There are bedrooms you like to remember and others you would like to forget."
17
"Sometimes memories follow you wherever you go-you don't need to take them with you."
17
"Memories carry thoughts through the passage of time."
17
"Since her time in the necromancer's clutches, she was still recovering lost memories from the quicksand of her mind. They'd drop like nuclear bombs, freezing her at the worst time as visuals which should've stayed forever buried bubbled to the surface."
17
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