Quotes About Memory

Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up.

There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, [...]; and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors.

I am trying to describe these things not to relive them in my present boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of hell and the portion of heaven in that strange, awful, maddening world- nymphet love. (135)

The days of my youth, as I look back on them; seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation can.

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory, I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the exact day which I first knew with certainty that the red convertible was following us.

For we die every day; oblivion thrives Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives, And our best yesterdays are now foul piles Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.

My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs. Whenever I'd permit, Or, with a silent shiver, order it, Whatever in my field of vision dwelt – An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte Stilettos of a frozen stillicide – Was printed on my eyelids' nether side Where it would tarry for an hour or two, And while this lasted all I had to do Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves

Forget me now, but remember me afterwards, when the bitter part is forgotten. This

Time is but memory in the making.

The recollection also came back empty, and for the first time in all his life, perhaps, Luzhin asked himself the question – where exactly had it all gone, what had become of his childhood, whither had the veranda floated, whither, rustling through the bushes, had the familiar paths crept away?

Speak, Memory is strictly autobiographic. There is nothing autobiographic in Lolita.

I was an infant when my parents died. Thye both were ornithologists. I've tried So often to evoke them that today I have a thousand parents. Sadly they Dissolve in their own virtues and recede, But certain words, chance words I hear or read, Such as bad heart always to him refer, And cancer of the pancreas to her.

Actually she was at least in her late twenties (I never established her exact age for even her passport lied) and had mislaid her virginity under circumstances that changed with her reminiscent moods.

Dimly, I recall running up to his chair to show him a pretty pebble, which he slowly examined and then slowly put into his mouth.

We loved - and it has all gone, somewhere... We loved - and now our love is frozen, and now it lies, one wing spread out, raising its little feet - a dead sparrow on the damp gravel... But we loved... we flew...

The more you love a memory; the stronger and stranger it becomes

You lose your immortality when you lose your memory. And if you land then on Terra Caelestis, with your pillow and chamberpot, you are made to room not with Shakespeare or even Longfellow, but with guitarists and cretins.

For some reason, I kept seeing it—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, pinging pebbles at an empty can.

Somehow, too, I remembered Chichikov's round of weird visits in Gogol's "Dead Souls.

Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

I am not concerned with the moron, the ordinary hairless ape, who takes everything in his stride; his only childhood memory is of a mule that bit him; his only consciousness of the future a vision of board and bed. What I am thinking of is the man of imagination and science, whose courage is infinite because his curiosity surpasses his courage.

Amikor korábbi önmagunkra emlékezünk, mindig ott van az a hosszú árnyékot vetÅ' kis figura, amely mint egy bizonytalan, megkésett vendég áll meg a megvilágított küszöbön egy kifogástalanul sz?külÅ' folyosó túlsó végén.

The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.