Quotes About Memory

I do not tolerate a world emptied of you. I have tried. For a year I have called every black tree Marya Morevna; I have looked for your face in the patterns of the ice. In the dark, I have pored over the loss of you like pale gold.

I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.

If one did not have at least a little luck, one would never survive childhood. But luck can be spent, like money; and lost, like a memory; and wasted, like a life.

The smell of loving is a difficult one to describe, but if you think of the times when someone has held you close and made you safe, you will remember how it smells just as well as I do.

No one is now what they were before the war. There's just no getting any of it back.

You cannot escape where you come from, September. Some part of it remains inside you always, like the slender white heart in the center of the thickest onion.

That's what a map is, you know. Just a memory.

It is not so easy to always remember who you are.

Dying happens to everyone, even stars. Even the stuff between the stars. But if you believe in yourself and achieve your goals, you can die so hard that no one will ever forget you, and that's almost as good as not dying at all. Well, it isn't, really, it isn't at all, and believing and achieving is just something sportscasters say, but what are you gonna do, not die? Try it. I'll wait.

Her father's shadow looked sadly down at her. "You can never forget what you do in a war, September my love. No one can. You won't forget your war either.

I wonder sometimes what the memory of God looks like. Is it a palace of infinite rooms, a chest of many jeweled objects, a long, lonely landscape where each tree recalls an eon, each pebble the life of a man? Where do I live, in the memory of God?

Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation.

He tried to reconstruct the story in his mind, but it kept getting confused, bleeding into itself like watercolors.

It tasted like a shade of white near blue; it tasted like the idea of pearls; it tasted like a memory nearly grasped but lost at the last moment.

I still think of myself as a house. Ravan tried to fix this problem of self-image, as he called it. To teach me to phrase my communication in terms of a human body. To say: let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together. But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken.

Everyone has their invisible cloak of all things past.

Humans do not proceed in an orderly fashion from one scene to the next. Memory lies underneath happenstance; hope and dread sprawl on top. Our days and nights are their endless orgies.

Do you remember being born? Only a few can say they do and not be caught immediately in the lie, and most of them are wizards. I, of course, remember it perfectly. Certain benefits are granted to narrators as part of the hiring package, to compensate for our irregular hours and unsafe working conditions.

We who were once living can guard you still, and love you, and keep you living safe and whole. Nothing ever truly dies.

I can never remember my dreams," said the shadow of the Marquess quietly. "You must have had rich, tasty ones then. When you can't remember a dream, it's because a Baku ate it.

You can never forget what you do in a war, September my love. No one can. You won't forget your war either.

You come and go, vanish and appear. You miss years that go by for us, and we miss years that go by for you. We never know when we will find you again, or if we will. You meet us out of order, and sometimes I'll be older and sometimes you will be because that's the kind of story we're in. It's all jumbled up on the outside, but it all makes sense in your head. It all flows the right way in your heart.

How long was it, between the time when you were happy, and the time when you wanted to kill him?

Memory is like that. It alters itself so that girls are always trapped under the earth, waiting in the dark.