Quotes About Memory

When one embraces a moment of rapture from the past, either by trying to reclaim it or by refusing to let it go, how can its brightness not tarnish, turn grey with longing and sorrow, until the wild spell of the remembered interlude is lost altogether and the memory of sadness claims its rightful place in the mind? And what is it we expect from the sun-drenched past? There is no formula for re-entry, nothing we can do to enable reconstruction.

But as the scissors snip-snapped through her hair and the razor shaved the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past. I cannot remember, she whispered to herself. I cannot remember. She's been shorn of memory as brutally as she'd been shorn of her hair, without permission, without reason... Gone, all gone, she thought again wildly, no longer even sure what was gone, what she was mourning.

What was can never be again.

Like the piano player, I have memory in my fingertips. I watch words spill out creating worlds, inventing colors, bridging generations.

Live, he whispered. For my Chaya. For all our Chayas. Live. And remember.

After a while, the story becomes the truth because no one actually remembers how things really happened.

Nothing is ever forgotten.

From the look on your face, I'd say you know him. I nodded. Sold him a cannoli when I was in high school. Connie grunted. Honey, half of all the women in New Jersey have sold him their cannoli

And the closest I've come to an out-of-body experience was when Joe Morelli took his mouth to me fourteen years ago, behind the eclair case.

She's lived with my parents since Grandpa Mazur took the big escalator to the heavenly food court in the sky.

were bond enforcement. "I guess I forgot my date

I walked Grandma to the front door and gave her a hug. 'I love you,' I said to Grandma. 'I love you, too,' Grandma said. 'Maybe that's why God gave us death. So, we remember to love what's alive.

I love you," I said to Grandma. "I love you, too," Grandma said. "Maybe that's why God gave us death. So, we remember to love what's alive.

Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest— where you want to erect a museum. Don't hoard the past, Astrid. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.

Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox.

Just make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

Who are you? the band sang. I tried to remember but I really couldn't say.

You want car?' Rena said. 'Artist college? You think I don't know? How you think you pay? So this dress. Pretty dress. Someone gave. But money is . . .' She stopped, struggling to find the words, what money was. Finally, she threw her hands up. 'Money. You want remember, so just remember.

I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of the water, the chink of the dogs' leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother's dip-pen, the smell of the trees, the stillness. I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck. I wished a sleep would find us, at this absolute second, like sleep over the castle of sleeping beauty.

Memory is the fourth landscape.

In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America, where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. We hadn't learned yet, that there was no such thing as an empty canvas.

I could see the two of us in the round mirror on the wall, our long hair down, our blue eyes. Norsewomen. When I saw us like this, I could almost remember fishing in cold deep seas, the smell of cod, the charcoal of our fires, our felt boots and our strange alphabet, runes like sticks, a language like the ploughing of fields.

The smell of the smoke always brought me back to my mother, to a rooftop under an untrustworthy moon. How beautiful she had been, how perfectly unhinged.

Always learn poems by heart," she said. "They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.