Quotes About Memory

Why do we begin to forget, then sometimes remember with such clarity people we've lost?

To quote Yogi Berra, it was déjà vu all over again.

in her eyes was something I'll remember the rest of my life.

Don't shoot me, Sidney, I love you." He had shot him right through the words that still haunted him today, the most perfect words ever said to him.

In the darkness things always go away from you. Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you. The only help you'll get is a few hard drinks and morning.

Mostly what you lose with time, in memory, is the specificity of things, their exact sequence. It all runs together, becomes a watery soup. Portmanteau days, imploded years. Like a bad actor, memory always goes for effect, abjuring motivation, consistency, good sense.

What are any of our lives but the shapes we force them into. Memory doesn't come to us of its own; we go after it, pull it into sunlight and make of it what we need, what we're driven towards, what we imagine, changing the world again and again with each new quarry, each descent, each morning.

there comes a time in life, when you realize that everything is a dream; only those things which are written down have any possibility of being real.

Great lovers lie in hell, the poet says. Even now, long afterwards, I cannot destroy the images. They remain within me like the yearnings of an addict. I need only hear certain words, see certain gestures, and my thoughts begin to tumble. I despise myself for thinking of her. Even if she were dead, I would feel the same. Her existence blackens my life.

I have not forgotten those days, I have only forgotten how simply they seemed to occur …

She constantly piles up her hair with her hands and then lets it fall. She laughs, but there is no sound. It's all in silence - she is made out of yesterdays.

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit.

It was all leaving her in slow, imperceptible movements, like the tide when one's back is turned: everyone, everything she had known. So all of grief and happiness, far from being buried with one, vanished beforehand except for scattered pieces. She lived among forgotten episodes, unknown faces bereft of names, closed off from the very world she had created; that was how it came to be. But I must show nothing of that, she thought. Her children---she must not reveal it to them.

He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, he cannot recognize it. It is more precious, he knows, than anything else they might own, but he does not have it.

Certains visages vous subjuguent, on s'en détourne avec le sentiment de renoncer même à respirer. Demain, j'aurai oublié tout ça, se dit-il. Le matin, tout est différent, les choses deviennent réelles.

To the world she knew, to the few friends who had by then drifted away, to everyone except himself and Dorothy, it was no longer important that she live. What had been her life, the people she knew and the deep pool of memory and knowing, had vanished or dried up and fallen apart.

Sonnet 55 that "Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme" [1–2]).

Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory

I hate women because they always remember where things are.

Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts. Senor Dali has the jump on me from the beginning. He remembers and describes in detail what it was like in the womb. My own earliest memory is of accompanying my father to a polling booth in Columbus, Ohio, where he voted for William McKinley.

Time lies frozen there. It's always Then. It's never Now.

Half the places I have been to, never were. I make things up. Half the things I say are there cannot be found. When I was young I told a tale of buried gold, and men from leagues around dug in the woods. I dug myself. But why? I thought the tale of treasure might be true. You said you made it up. I know I did, but then I didn't know I had. I forget things, too.

At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.

I don't remember any blue poodles.