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Memory Quotes
"The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart."
17
"The two offices of memory are collection and distribution."
17
"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."
17
"I may remember you, Scarlet, he bellowed, backing up when she grabbed her fork and held it out like a dagger. She'd murdered men with less. Even immortals. "But you haven't haunted me. Motions stiff, he raised his shirt. Amid the cuts, above his heart, was a tattoo of eyes. Dark eyes. Like hers. "Don't you see? You haven't haunted me.""
17
"An excellent photograph is the one which has excellently captured an excellent moment!"
17
"That as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive."
17
"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."
17
"I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I'm goin to tell you you'll think peculiar but it's the god's truth. That was in nineteen and thirty one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I dont think I'll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night."
17
"She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death."
17
"Little did I know that the last words I would say on WNBC would be the last ones anyone would say."
17
"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."
17
"People change us. It is a rare, if not an impossible occurrence, that we come out of relationships unscathed. In our dealings with people we take something with us and we leave something behind. Some people are haunted more than others, either by the sweet perfume of another or the stink of regret."
17
"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."
17
"...but the loss of a memory, like the omission of a phrase during reading, rather than making for uncertainty, can lead to a premature certainty."
17
"There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized."
17
"When I hear a man say that his childhood was the happiest time of his life, I think (puff) my friend, you have had a pretty poor life."
16
"Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture."
16
"If you have ever walked in Paris, you will see that Paris will ever walk in your memoires!"
16
"What exactly did you find in Atlanta?Frank unzipped his backpack and started bringing out souvenirs. "Some peach preserves. A couple of T-shirts. A snow globe. And, um, these not-really-Chinese handcuffs.Annabeth forced herself to stay calm. "How about you start from the top-of the story, not the backpack."
16
"I bought this the day before at a shopping mall. I didn't want to forget him. Maybe I didn't want him to forget me."
16
"But we do not need to recount every sermon and eulogy. After all, you were there."
16
"Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says."
16
"Memories, even bittersweet ones, are better than nothing."
16
"Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning she haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again."
16
"When our consciousness has become a haven of illusions, our mind may have a hard time to fight the maze in our thinking. Only anchor points from our past and the innocence of our childhood might give back the core of what we are. ['Not without the past']"
16
"The clock's pendulum catches the firelight, and in the rattle-breathed final moments of Jacob de Zoet, amber shadows in the far corner coagulate into a woman's form. She slips between the bigger, taller onlookers unnoticed and adjusts her headscarf, the better to hide her burn. She places her cool palms on Jacob's fever-glazed face.Jacob sees himself, when he was young, in her narrow eyes. Her lips touch the place between his eyebrows. A well-waxed paper door slides open."
16
"She allowed history to leave her without trying to hold it back, the way children allow a grand parade to pass, holding it in their memory, making it an unforgettable thing, making it their own."
16
"We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it."
16
"Let not the rash marble riskgarrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence,in many words recallingname, renown, events, birthplace.All those glass jewels are best left in the dark.Let not the marble say what men do not.The essentials of the dead man's life--the trembling hope,the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight--will abide forever.Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continuewhen it is the lives of others that will make that happen,as you yourself are the mirror and imageof those who did not live as long as youand others will be (and are) your immortality on earth."
16
"But I can't see anything any more: however much I search the past I can only retrieve scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, nor whether they are remembered or invented."
16
"It's just as hard to go back to a place you once left, as it is to leave it again."
16
"When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf."
16
"He did not have anything on him except her thoughts, except the good times he had once shared and the bad times he so desperately wanted to forget."
16
"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."
16
"I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was."
16
"My school-days! The silent gliding on of my existence-the unseen, unfelt progress of my life-from childhood up to youth! Let me think, as I look back upon that flowing water, now a dry channel overgrown with leaves, whether there are any marks along its course, by which I can remember how it ran."
16
"Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar. Man the sum of his climatic experiences Father said. Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire."
16
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