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Memory Quotes
"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."
7
"Eric moved the broom experimentally and made an attempt to sweep the glass into the pan while it lay in the middle of the floor. Of course, the pan slid away. Eric scowled.I'd finally found something Eric did poorly."
7
"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."
7
"Let my memories of you be like water on the moon. A beautiful impossibility - but allowing me to sleep and dream of infinite beginnings rather than Othello endings."
7
"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."
7
"I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer -- and what trees and seasons smelled like -- how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich."
7
"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']"
7
"This seems to have been St. Augustine's very notion of 'memory, ' not just nostalgia for some past moment, but connecting past, present, and future in one complete contemplative knowing."
7
"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."
7
"It's just as hard to go back to a place you once left, as it is to leave it again."
7
"You remember some bedrooms you have slept in. There are bedrooms you like to remember and others you would like to forget."
7
"Memories carry thoughts through the passage of time."
7
"As usual, he saves his wife's for last. He leans on the cane and he looks at the headstone and he thinks about many things. Taffy. He thinks about taffy. He thinks it would take his teeth out now, but he would eat it anyhow, if it meant eating it with her."
7
"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."
7
"Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it."
7
"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."
7
"I was a hip kid. When I saw Bambi it was the midnight show."
7
"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."
7
"But memory is less disposed to compromise."
7
"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."
7
"She is no longer a person in his life; instead, she is a person that other people will remind him of."
7
"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."
7
"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."
7
"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.""
7
"It was a mistake to think of houses, old houses, as being empty. They were filled with memories, with the faded echoes of voices. Drops of tears, drops of blood, the ring of laughter, the edge of tempers that had ebbed and flowed between the walls, into the walls, over the years.Wasn't it, after all, a kind of life?And there were houses, he knew it, that breathed. They carried in their wood and stone, their brick and mortar a kind of ego that was nearly, very nearly, human."
7
"Memory is the coherence of life, that possesses all your emotions, and ambitions. Without it, your joyous as well as agonizing experiences of life won't have any significance to you whatsoever."
7
"Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?"
7
"It's not until you're older that you realise how important the things that happened to you when you were a kid are. Even things you only half remember."
7
"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."
7
"[In] everyday life, it is very rare that we are confronted with new facts about events of long ago. Our memories are almost never challenged. They can, instead, be frozen in place, no matter how flawed they are, or become a work in continual artistic revision."
7
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