Quotes About Memory

I had no idea what time I'd left, how I'd gotten home, who'd been up here, and how long he, she, or they had stayed. Another night, added to the hundreds that had gone before, shrouded in mystery. Really, when you thought about it, it was creepy. My own life was a secret to me.

Love is as enduring as your attention on your heart allows love to hold you and last from the time you forget the very word love to the time you remember how to feel it again.

The way that I miss you is like heavy rain drenching every inch of my body, and when I am dry again and forget you I miss missing you, until tears fill my eyes and I blink too fast to remember you until your face flashes before my eyes.

Your love is like the trees gently blowing through my mind. You heart is streamed with leaves delicate as the seasons. Your soul is as the memory of all that heaven divulges.

I('m the woman who) always forgot where she was-in a state, in a sentence.

Only missed being a jumper, or dying in the collapse, by five minutes. That ash on me, later I thought about it. That was people. Probably people I knew.

In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.

I know my head isn't screwed on straight. I want to leave, transfer, warp myself to another galaxy. I want to confess everything, hand over the guilt and mistake and anger to someone else. There is a beast in my gut, I can hear it scraping away at the inside of my ribs. Even if I dump the memory, it will stay with me, staining me. My closest is a good thing, a quiet place that helps me hold these thoughts inside my head where no one can hear them.

Oft in the stilly night, Ere Slumber's chain has bound me, Fond memory brings the light Of other days around me; The smiles, the tears, Of boyhood years, The words of love then spoken; The eyes that shown Now dimmed and gone, The cheerful hearts now broken. (from When the Splendor Falls by Laurie McBain)

There is a price for forgetting and remembering. Forgetting as a form of escape deprives us of what the Five Gifts can offer––humility, patience, empathy, forgiveness, and growth.

My former identity was lying around, somewhere, fragmented and buried, like shards from an earlier civilization.

Who recollects distinctly his past adventures, knows his destiny to come.

More so than with any other instrument, the violin becomes part of the body. Good musicians are physically dissolved when playing, and for violinists, who cannot see where to place their fingers and have nothing to guide them through touch, music must be more than ever about memory than fingertips and breath; the ventage is deeper, more of the self, closer to singing.

This is a work of memory -- facts have been altered. Names have been changed.

I got to know [teen music] as we absorb music in passing but can remember only its seriousness and weight.

I dialed it now, and the machine picked up. I listened to a dead man's voice. I hung up, wondering how long it would be before someone unplugged the machine, how long before the telephone company cut off the phone service. You don't die all at once. Not anymore. These days you die a little at a time.

It is a remarkable ending. On one level the story of the boy and his father is linked to the imperative of rendering a just verdict. Yet by ending within a quotation, Shawcross permits the story to stand outside its legal frame. And though Shawcross presents the act of legal judgment as a potential safeguard against future atrocity, the thrust of his conclusion asks us to look not forward but back. The final imperative that Shawcross places before the court is the duty to remember.

I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.

These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.

in the true mad north] of introspection, where 'falcons of the inner eye' dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.

I looked up from the street and again at the wretched captives. I vowed not to let the noises of the city drown out their voices or rob me of my past. It was less painful to forget, but I would look and I would remember.

the symbolic dimensions of disaster and recovery cannot be separated from political history. Even as buildings and memorials become the touchstones of memory and identity, they are also implicated in larger social, cultural, and political processes.

A kind of journal of forgotten, reworked, and remembered holy moments, too awesome to be simply described in everyday conscious language. It is all that remains of the most penetrating incursion of waking into the earth-mother-Jewish-people darkness of what is not the spirit, but only sleep. But the memory is still there, set in our bodies by our parents or our choice. We may ignore the dream or we may appropriate it for ourselves, and so make it our own. It is our choice alone.

All creation is patterned according to an inner blueprint or arrangement that carries within it a genetic memory of everything that ever happens.