Quotes About Memory

Y entonces supe que lo más punzante no era la ausencia de Lolita a mi lado, sino la ausencia de su voz en ese concierto

El delicioso hecho íntimo ocurrido anoche había sido la causa de que todo el caleidoscopio de su vida variara, y había evocado el pasado de un modo avasallador.

What's so awful is that one can't tear up the past by its roots. One can't tear it out, but one can hide one's memory of it.

But that mimosa grove--the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since--until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.

Did I ever mention that her bare arm bore the 8 of vaccination? That I loved her hopelessly? That she was only fourteen?

Vladimir Nabokov

That Voice in the Mist rang out in the dimmest passage of my mind. It was but the echo of some possible truth, a timely reminder: don't be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present. Beware of the most honest broker. Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale.

The orange blossom would have scarcely withered on the grave', as a poet might have said. But I am not poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder.

compuse un madrigal al negro humo de sus pestañas, al pálido gris de sus ojos inexpresivos, a las cinco pecas asímetricas de su nariz respingona, al vello rubio de sus miembros tostados; pero lo rompí y ahora no puedo recordarlo.

Los veinticinco años que había vivido desde entonces se empequeñecieron hasta convertirse en un latido agónico y luego desaparecer.

He was beloved not for any essential ability but for those unforgettable digressions of his, when he would remove his glasses to beam at the past while massaging the lenses of the present.

Her mind kept fading in the growing mist. She still could speak. She paused, and groped, and found What seemed at first a serviceable sound, But from adjacent cells impostors took The place of words she needed, and her look Spelt imploration as she sought in vain To reason with the monsters in her brain.

Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue.

She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago

Ganin now tried to recapture that scent again, mixed with the fresh smells of the autumnal park, but, as we know, memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

Blood-black nothingness began to spin. A system of cells interlinked, within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked within one stem. And dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

the book like a sleigh left my lap...

I dreamt of you last night—as if I was playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me.

I find it inordinately hard to speak about my other brother. He is a mere shadow in the background of my richest and most detailed recollections. It is one of those lives that hopelessly claim a belated something--compassion, understanding, no matter what--which the mere recognition of such a want can neither replace nor redeem.

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

Was I in here last night and did I spend a $20 bill? Oh, thank goodness... I thought I'd lost it.

He had always said to himself that there could be no persistence of personality, of character, of identity, of consciousness, except through memory; yet here, to the last implication of temperament, they all persisted. The soul that was passing in its integrity through time without the helps, the crutches, of remembrance by which his own personality supported itself, why should not it pass so through eternity without that loss of identity which was equivalent to annihilation?

No day shall erase you from the memory of time. An inscription on a wall from 911 by Virgil Aeneid.

Wars might come and go, but the seven o'clock news lives forever.