Quotes About Memory

The future was coming nearer, one relentless goose step after the next. Juliet could still remember when Hitler had seemed like a harmless clown. No one was amused now. ("The clowns are the dangerous ones," Perry said.)

When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.

Jennifer had never liked the pain of remembering what had happened, but for Theo it was the pain that kept Laura alive in his memory. He was afraid that if it ever began to heal she would disappear.

She had been here before. She had never been here before. There was always something just out of sight, just around a corner, something she could never chase down—something that was chasing her down.

As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn't really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference.

Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn't even a shape left in the world where you'd been, neither the trace of a smile nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing.

Home', it had struck her on the torturous drive back to London, wasn't Egerton Gardens, wasn't even Fox Corner. Home was an idea, and like Arcadia it was lost in the past.

Time isn't circular," she said to Dr. Kellet. "It's like a… palimpsest.

Do you keep time in the same place that you save it? If so why is it always so difficult to find? It must be in a very safe place.

The more Viola forgot her mother, the more she missed her.

The roof of the big top was dark blue, spangled with silver stars, and it reminded him of something but he couldn't think what, and then he realized it was the roof - the vault of heaven - in a side chapel at the Catholic church where his mother dragged them three times a day on Sunday when they were very small, until she ran out of energy and let the devil have them. (One Good Turn)

The past is what you take with you.

There were so many facts that Amelia no longer felt certain about (or perhaps she had never known them). She would soon be nearer fifty than forty, and she was sure that every day she could feel more neural pathways disappearing—fusing and arcing and dying—leaving her unable to retrieve information.

Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn't just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere at the bottom of an unknown ocean.

More and more these days, he had noticed, he felt like a visitor from another planet. Or the past. Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn't just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere

Ursula tried to remember what her own last words to her father had been. A nonchalant 'See you later,' she concluded. The final irony. 'We never know when it will be the last time,' she said...

It was the war, Juliet thought, remembering the photograph of the flamingo's creased wife, it has made refugees of us all.

All those unclaimed arms and legs lost in the fields of Flanders – Ursula imagined them pushing roots down into the mud and shoots up to the sky and growing once again into men. An army of men marching back for revenge.

That man scorches with his brightness, who overpowers inferior capacities, yet he shall be revered when dead.

When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren't told or books weren't written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day.

Everyone remembers his past with greater vividness as the present becomes more important. Dying men in their last delirium are supposed to see their whole life spread out before them.

It is not without reason that fame is awarded only after death. The cloud-dust of notoriety which follows and envelops the men who drive with the wind bewilders contemporary judgment.

Sometimes when a man gets older he has a revelation and wants awfully bad to get back to the place where he left his life, but he can't get to that place- not often.

You know the Greeks didn't write obituaries. They only asked one question after a man died: "Did he have passion?"