Quotes About Memory

I knew now that the trouble with the dead wasn't that they overwhelmed you, that they haunted you and stifled you with memories. The trouble with the dead was that they packed up and left you, and there was nothing you could do to bring them back.

How we remember and what we remember and why we remember form the most personal map of our individuality.

For as long as I could remember, I had always been the girl who had watched her father kill her mother.

Pale as a candle flame in the dusk, tallow-pale, he stalked along, holding her hand, and Louie looked up and beyond him at the enfeebled stars. Thus, for many years, she had seen her father's head, a ghostly earth flame against the heavens, from her little height. Sam looked down on the moon of her face; the dayshine was enough still to light the eyeballs swimming up to him.

Kane to Rose] I'll never forget the way you looked walking toward me. I never thought that I'd have a woman like you in my life. It's all there etched in my brain. And now, the way the light pours over our hair, the way all that silk shines, so black it's nearly blue. The world disappears when I'm holding you.

We're all products of our past…

She knew every scar, every tattoo. She had traced every one of those scars and tattoos with her tongue. With her fingertips. She'd memorized them until they were etched so deeply in her brain, she could have drawn them and gotten every detail perfect.

Kiss me, Raven. Remember me." She lifted long lashes and searched his black, hungry gaze with blue eyes that had darkened to deep purple. There was a burning intensity in the heat of his gaze, of his body. "If I kiss you, Mikhail, I won't be able to stop.

Her neck throbbed and burned for a moment. She peeled back her top to examine the wound. It was a strange mark, like a teenager's love bite, but more intense. She blushed at the memory of how he'd put it there. Did the man have to be sexy on top of everything else?

In their world, once two shadows were connected and totally interwoven, breaking those shadows apart was a frightening prospect. The riders would lose all ability to ride the shadows and the departing non-Ferraro partner would lose all memory of the family and what they did.

He cursed his inability to remember basic things, certain they were of great importance to the two of them. If she was as much in the dark as he was, they were in deep trouble.

Does anyone in this room remember they're in the military?" Griffen demanded. "Occasionally," Mack said, "when we get bad intel.

I don't believe that I could stop loving someone without retaining some sort of fondness for him. He was, by then, a part of my past, but I know he will always own that small part of me which I gave to him and which he did not know existed.

Soviel ich weiß, enden viele Abstiege tödlich, weil die Aufsteiger vergessen, daß der Weg zurück ins Vertraute manchmal größere Leidensfähigkeit und die Aufbietung größerer Kräfte verlangt als die Route hinauf in den Traum.

Not until she stood at her sink, splashing cold water on her face, did she remember her little hippo. What the hell was that about? When did her unconscious get so fucking whimsical? And what fine truth was he going to tell her?

Remembering was pointless; but forgetting somehow seemed immoral.

The past is a weight that can end up crushing your life.

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.

We make no saint of Thomas Jefferson—we leave the mindless business of canonization and the worship of humans to the fanatics—but aware as we are of his many crimes and contradictions we say with confidence that his memory and example will endure long after the moral pygmies who try to blot out his name have been forgotten.

On page 603 it is stated that at first Blumenthal could not remember the lunch with me and my wife at which he had loudly impugned two female witnesses against Clinton. This makes it distinctly odd that he should have such have a vivid and detailed but mistaken recollection of the same lunch on page 607.

It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory.

Kierkegaard so shrewdly observes, one is condemned to live it forward and review it backward.

It was only when the Britain of great prewar dominions had become a memory that nostalgia for it became possible.

lying on "mattress graves.