Quotes About Memory

A story has to stick with those who tell it. It belongs to them. Just like the October Boy, it's got nowhere else to go.

the church, but in memory I go and stand

The written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it recreates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination.

And now, he continued, speaking to Milo, where were you on the night of July 27? What does that have to do with it? asked Milo. It's my birthday, that's what, said the policeman as he entered Forgot my birthday in his little book. Boys always forget other people's birthdays.

He paused again as a tear of longing rolled from cheek to lip with the sweet-salty taste of an old memory.

Perhaps someday you can have one city as easy to see as Illusions and as hard to forget as Reality.

The note that she struck had beaten down the doors of a closed memory; and Father Abram held his lost Aglaia close in his arms.

Miss Phœbe released the low key of the organ. But her work had been well done. The note that she struck had beaten down the doors of a closed memory; and Father Abram held his lost Aglaia close in his arms.

The past reappears because it is a hidden present.

oh life to live, life already lived, time that comes back in a swell of sea, time that recedes without turning its head, the past is not past, it is still passing by, flowing silently into the next vanishing moment

Las épocas viejas nunca desaparecen completamente y todas las heridas, aun las más antiguas, manan sangre todavía.

Pero su recuerdo no me abandona. Quien ha visto la Esperanza, no la olvida. La busca bajo todos los cielos y entre todos los hombres. Y sueña que un día va a encontrarla de nuevo, no sabe dónde, acaso entre los suyos. En cada hombre late la posibilidad de ser o, más exactamente, de volver a ser , otro hombre.

Days that haunt the poem's single day are like the air revisiting this house of vocables that you and I designed: its windows watch an ocean and a sky to learn what portion of the other's mind the jet-trails presage: letters are stones that fly to settle in a wall of which the line traces an hour, a where, a place of thought. What is more palpable, the thing we saw or the images its recollection brought into the mind to ask us what we are? from "Day

La arquitectura es el testigo insobornable de la historia.

Past epochs never vanish completely, and blood still drips from all their wounds, even the most ancient.

El lente es una poderosa prolongación del ojo y, sin embargo, lo que nos muestra la fotografía, una vez revelada la película, es algo que no vio el ojo o que no pudo retener la memoria. Imaginar, componer y crear son verbos colindantes. Por la composición, la fotografía es un arte.

For what, after all, is the difference between a memory and a fantasy? Are not both a succession of imprecisely rendered images further obscured by imprecisely chosen words and animated only by the wistful effort of one's imagination? And who is to say that a vividly imagined moment of happiness is not, in the end, more enriching to the spirit than a hazy semi-recollection of some pallid pastime?

this stray little thought released in him some echo of the past, a solitary trembling note whose sound rose higher and higher in his chest, awakening inarticulate longings and, inseparable from them, a piercing, unfamiliar sorrow.

The things we remember are not necessarily the most permanent or even the most meaningful, but they are often the brightest, and maybe that is why in the end they matter most.

A dream house unfolding at some magical juncture of the past and the future, bypassing the dull, heartbroken, trivial present, born equally out of memory and promise . . .

Also, and most disconcertingly, why did the recollection of the young courier kneeling before her—the brief pressure of his hand upon her bare instep as he had helped guide it inside the slipper, the golden brown of his gaze that had lingered one moment too long on her lips, the soft burr of his accent (like her, he had come from a distant land as a child)—why did it make her feel so profoundly unsettled?

Two or more year ago she was out workin' in her rose garden one mornin' - did you know, boy, she's got over sixty different kinds out there? - and she said to me, said, 'Mr. Blakeslee, I wouldn't even mind dyin' if'n I could be buried in a bed of roses.

I think part of the problem is that many years ago, in Korea, Mike's brain adapted to continuous threat—his body and brain became oversensitive and overreactive to any threat-related signals from the world. Back then, to stay alive, his brain made a connection—basically a specialized form of memory—between the sounds of gunfire and shelling and the need to activate an extreme survival response." I paused. "Does that make sense?

Time had not faded my memories (as I had prayed to God it might), nor had it healed my wounds as it is said always to do. I began each day with the hope that the next day would be better, my recollections a little less pointed, but I would awake to the same pain, as if a black lamp were burning eternally inside me, radiating darkness.