Quotes About Memory

A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.

Time carries all things, even our wits, away.

Now when these souls have trodden the full circle of a thousand years, God call's all of them forth in long procession to the Lethe River, and this he does so that when they again visit the sky's vault they may be without memory, and a wish to re-enter bodily life may dawn.

non et vario noctem sermone trahebat infelix Dido, longumque bibebat amorem, multa super Priamo rogitans, super Hectore multa; nunc quibus Aurorae venisset filius armis, nunc quales Diomedis equi, nunc quantus Achilles.

Do you believe this is what the dead care about when they are buried in the grave?

He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.

Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you.

Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.

She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable --- this interminable life.

With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.

for women live much more in the past...they attach themselves to places;

it is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams

For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did.

Death is woven in with the violets," said Louis. "Death and again death.")

I exist only in the soles of my feet and in the tired muscles of my thighs. We have been walking for hours it seems. But where? I cannot remember.

I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.

In case you ever foolishly forget: I am never not thinking of you.

Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life?

At the moment I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.

Everyone has friends who were killed in the War. Everyone gives up something when they marry.

There was an embrace in death.