Quotes About Memory

Well, there's a piece of Maria in every song that I sing. And the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings. And there is always one last light to turn out and one last bell to ring. And the last one out of the circus has to lock up everything.

Reality never changes. Only our recollections of it do. Whenever a moment passes, we pass along with it into the realm of memory. And in that realm, geometries change. Contours shift, shades lighten, objectivities dissolve. Memory becomes what we need it to be.

There are only three major vote getting days in Absoroka County, and I can't remember the other two. Oh God, no. It's Pancake Day. I thought about shooting myself. I could see the headlines: Sheriff shoots self, unable to face pancakes.

Sometimes time cannot tick backwards. Sometimes you cannot put a dragon back in a forest, nor a witch back in a tree-trunk, nor the breath back into a friend when all the breath has gone.

History is a ghost story.

When a young rabbit spots a hawk circling above, it may never have seen such a creature before- but there is some ancestral memory that tells it to be afraid, to leap in great, panicky bounds to the safety of the burrow

She wonders if memory is little more than this: a series of erasure and perfected selections.

Her past, she fears, is eclipsing her present.

The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books.

The family is a police state, the Visitor said, describing how minuscule stages lit up inside her, repeating key scenes from her life. Do people remember only what they can endure, or distort memories until they can endure them? After a long silence, A. said: Childhood is a city you never leave. In Berlin's past, we seek our own.

Do people remember only what they can endure, or distort memories until they can endure them?

And then again, maybe people and things are the same as emotions: Even when you can't see them or feel them or be with them, and even when they have died and even before they are born, they still exist somewhere. Far away or close, they're always somewhere. Maybe nothing in the world is truly lost, I think.

I had no idea, of course, that of all the feelings of my youth that would pass, it was this one, of an abundance of time so great as to routinely be unfillable, that would vanish with the least ceremony.

Well-- My mother paused, and her tone was reflective in that way that is inevitably sad, because the past is sad. What I remember, she said, is that you were always such a dear little girl.

I have no idea, of course, that of all the feelings of my youth that would pass, it was this one, of an abundance of time so great as to routinely be unfillable, that would vanish with the least ceremony.

Virginia Woolf was a babe.' Of the many foolish things I said in graduate school, this is the one that haunts me the most. But I didn't regret it immediately.

Recognizing you was understanding you had thoughts in your head, finding the same things funny or excruciating, remembering what you'd said months or even years after you'd said it.

Jeff had made himself a place, inside himself, a kind of tower room, round, without any windows. In that room, he had locked his memory of the beach on the island, all the memories from the day hours and from the night hours. He had discovered how to step inside that room and slide the curved door closed and bolt it across.

Our memories are card-indexes consulted and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.

I imagine the earth when I am no more: Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley. Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born, Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

But then he didn't want to remember, because she had been nothing to him then, and his nature revolted from remembering her as she was when she was nothing to him.

I don't want the corpses of flowers about me.

Delivered helpless and amazed From the womb of the All, I am waiting dazed For memory to be erased. Then I shall know the Elysium That lies outside the monstrous womb Of time from out of which I come.