Quotes About Memory

A photograph is memory in the raw.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there; but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book, & ransack every page.

What you undoubtedly want is about two paragraphs of facts. I've forgotten so many of the facts. I don't remember what is true and what might have been true... As for the picture — I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.

A scar is a memory from the scrapbook your body is keeping about you.

Scar — fossil in flesh, a hard-earned relic from your life

A scar is a moment of your life preserved like the imprint of a pressed flower in a scrapbook.

She could feel the echo of lovemaking in her body in the same way she could feel the rock and shift of waves after a day of swimming, long after she left the water.

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.

While writing a novel about those who have lost their memories, he himself begins to lose his memory… He rushes to finish it before he forgets what he was writing.

De laatste persoon die zich mij herinnert als kind is heengegaan, zei ik tegen mijzelf. En toen pas begon ik te huilen, als een kind.

The past is our only real possession in life. It is the one piece of property of which time cannot deprive us; it is our own in a way that nothing else in life is. In a word, we are our past; we do not cling to it, it clings to us.

But the day will come when you will have to answer for it! You know I didn't come here alone to-day——!" Both men looked startled and glanced uneasily into the shadows, as if there might be someone lurking there. "God came with me and He knows! He'll make you remember some day!

O," said the child, disappointed, "I thought you'd maybe seed Him sometime. But He look like you, He do. I thought He was you all's fader." The little girl turned away, but her words lingered in Christie's heart. His Father! How that stirred some memory! His Father in heaven! Had he perhaps spoken wrong when he claimed no relationship with Jesus, the Christ?

Talleta muistiisi itse rakkaus äläkä sen menettämistä

One of the things we do as poets, is to try to preserve experiences, people, places important to us, in an effort to save them from time's erasure.

I finally understood that I didn't lack pen and paper but my own memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking, a great human gift disowned.

I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library. Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified. He said, What? What life? No life of mine.

I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them. The librarian said $32 even and you've owed it for eighteen years. I didn't deny anything. Because I don't understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away.

Remembering is organized for significance (not usefulness)

I am a man who is come. I am a man who is here. I bring nothing but myself and will take away nothing but myself when I leave. But I will do my very best to leave something behind.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

We truly are a species with amnesia. We have forgotten a very important part of our story.

Somewhere, all the people we have loved and lost are still among us, in the house that we call history.