Quotes About Memory

While the past is unchangeable, our perceptions of it are malleable.

few people in the department. Like him, they recognized the name but couldn't place it.

So that's the ghost you been running from. You know, the ghost, the memory. I been watchin' you, workin' day and night, slavin' so hard you barely breath. People do that for three reasons. Either they crazy, or stupid, or tryin' to forget. And with you, I knew you were tryin' to forget. I just didn't know what. - Gus

You used that one a month ago," she said calmly. "You're probably

My father finally died a month before he turned 101, his license

la nuova versione vibrante, in carne e ossa del passato che non lo aveva mai abbandonato. Più di una volta una versione più giovane di Amanda gli era comparsa in sogno e si chiedeva se quei sogni sarebbero cambiati in futuro. Che aspetto avrebbe avuto lei? Non lo sapeva. Sapeva solo che stare qui con lei lo faceva sentire completo, in un modo che pochi potevano capire.

Esa chica fue tu primer amor, y hagas lo que hagas, siempre estará presente en tu corazón.

Si de verdad existe un lugar llamado Cielo, nos volveremos a encontrar, ya que no hay Cielo sin ti.

but the prism through which I view her remains for me unchanging. To me, she will always be twenty- one and I twenty- three.

Rather often I am asked whether the grief remains as intense as when I wrote. The answer is, No. The wound is no longer raw. But it has not disappeared. That is as it should be. If he was worth loving, he is worth grieving over. Grief is existential testimony to the worth of the one loved. That worth abides. So I own my grief. I do not try to put it behind me, to get over it, to forget it… Every lament is a love-song.

Will the time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish the feedstock for my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory? Will I reach a point where there will be a good chance, I mean a more than fifty-fifty chance, that any random idea popping back into the foreground of my consciousness will be an idea that first came to me when I was an adult, rather than one I had repeatedly as a child?

I went with her to the dentist when she had her wisdom teeth out. Afterward she slept curled for a long time, a small beautiful person; there on her desk in a glass of water were the two enormous teeth. They were like the femurs of brontosauri. How those giant teeth could have fit into her head I don't know.

Many fathers are gone. Some leave, some are left. Some return, unknown and hungry. Only the dog remembers.

I'm riding beside my best friend, and I tell him, in the same offhand tone my mother had used, That's my grandfather's funeral, and he looks at me as if I'm insane.

Everything he did, as long as you stayed in the village, whether shouting obscenities at passing children or sleeping in the cemetery, all would be remembered when they looked at you, they would say to themselves or to whomever they were with, It's his father, you know, the crazy one, the drunk, and they couldn't help but wonder what part of his madness had passed on to you, which part you had escaped.

A couple of months ago, I became depressed by the realization that I'd forgotten pretty much everything I've ever read. I have, however, bounced back: I am now cheered by the realization that if I've forgotten everything I've ever read then I can read some of my favorite books again as if for the first time .

I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn't something I'm very good at.

But the internet had changed everything: nobody was forgotten anymore.

I have measured out my life in Arsenal fixtures, and any event of any significance has a footballing shadow.

Did you know that Jacques Benveniste, one of the world's leading homeopathic scientists, now claims that you can *email* homeopathic remedies? Yeah, see, what you do is you can take the memory of the diluted substance out of the water electromagnetically, put it on your computer, email it, and play it back on a sound card into new water. I mean, that could work, right? (Nick's thoughts after reading Francis Wheen's book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World)

They already knew that they would be telling people about the morning for a long time to come, maybe for the rest of their lives, and the taxi ride was the first attempt at a first draft of a story that would have to satisfy parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren.

How had I managed to edit all this out in the intervening years? How had I managed to turn her into the answer to all the world's problems?

I can see everything once it's already happened--I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.

I can see everything once it's already happened—I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.