Quotes About Memory

The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.

Se había ido, y lo único que quedaba era el espacio en que habías crecido en torno a ella, rodeándola, como crece un árbol rodeando una cerca.

Why do people always have to be named after dead people? If they had to be named after anything at all, why can't it be things, which have more permanence, like the sky or the sea, or even ideas...?

Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form

My son's mother, the girl I fell in love with when I was ten, died five years ago. I expect to join her soon, at least in that. Tomorrow. Or the next day. Of that I am convinced. I thought it would be strange to live in the world without her in it. And yet. I'd gotten used to living with her memory a long time ago. Only at the very end did I see her again. I snuck into her room in the hospital and sat with her every day.

His memory had abandoned him, and though he had searched within himself all these weeks, he could find no desire to have it returned. If it came back now, he felt he would turn it away, and the knowledge of this renouncement, a small act of defiance, gave him a feeling of liberty.

I took a drink, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, repeating the gesture that was made a hundred times by my father and his father and his father's father, eyes half closed as the sharpness of the alcohol replaced the sharpness of grief.

Once, coming out of the cool, dark lab into the heat of the desert sun, he'd briefly wondered if the emptiness he'd been so staunchly guarding was, not the absence of memory, but actually a memory itself: a recollection of the blazing white potential that had existed before he was born. The emptiness an infant possesses in the very first moments, when consciousness begins like the answer to a question never asked.

The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.

Like human memory, the surface of our planet distorts the record, emphasising more recent events and letting the rest pass into vagueness - or at least into unimpressive joints in worn down mountain chains.

it is not unusual to sift through ashes and find an unburnt picture

Man's heart is a ditch full of blood. The loved ones who have died throw themselves down on the bank of this ditch to drink the blood and so come to life again; the dearer they are to you, the more of your blood they drink." - The Narrator.

It is impossible for me to remember how many days or weeks went by in this way. Time is round, and it rolls quickly.

I was once more struck by the truth of the ancient saying: Man's heart is a ditch full of blood. The loved ones who have died throw themselves down on the bank of this ditch to drink the blood and so come to life again; the dearer they are to you, the more of your blood they drink.

I lived six months with her. Since that day - God be my witness! - 1 need fear nothing. Nothing, I say. Nothing, except one thing: that the devil, or God, wipe out those six months from my memory.

She disappeared. Since then I had never thought anymore of her. Nevertheless, she must have continued to live deep down in my heart, and today, on this empty coast, she reappeared, pale and plaintive, from the depths of my being.

And I am glad, because although no one else in the world remembers him now, he will live inside me as long as I live. We shall die together. This grandfather was the first to make me wish not to die - so that the dead within me should not die. Since then, many departed dead ones have sunk, not into the grave, but into my memory, and I know now that as long as I live they shall live too.

They don't know that I'm dead, and my ghost is holding on.

I call my wife and tell her I'm going to sleep at the lab. She reminds me that she left me a week ago. Louis tries to crack me up by pantomiming humping a chimp through the cage.

I am an old man, and I am dying...Will you remember me, Jacob? I promise, one day, I will join you, Mr. Gold. Mr. Gold's laughter sounded like a trumpet and brought light to the corners of the room.

Michael held his hand as he hallucinated, talking to some of the people who had left footprints on his memory when they had walked across his life.

These facts have been completely removed from history. One has to practically scream them from the rooftops.

Amnesia constrains ambition and inoculates against patience. Still

It's always hard to remember love - years pass and you say to yourself, Was I really in love, or was I just kidding myself? Was I really in love, or was I just pretending he was the man of my dreams? Was I really in love, or was I just desperate?