Quotes About Memory

There's something very strange about Sherlock Holmes, especially if you're an English schoolboy. When you read the stories, they stay with you forever.

That's the strange thing about making a record. You can be in one mood for an hour, put it on a record, and you're remembered that way.

It's a strange thing to keep having this image of you at the age of seven, 12 or 14 as the one that everyone not only remembers you by, but wants to think in some way that you still are.

My mother arrived in Brussels in 1938 from a small town near Krakow. But strangely enough, in 1942 or 1943, she was taken back to Auschwitz, which was just 30 miles from where she grew up. Her parents died there and a lot of her family.

My earliest memory is of my first day at primary school and the distress of seeing my mother part from me.And being in a room full of strangers - of aliens. I felt that I would never see her again.

One of the strangest aspects of living with certain kinds of memory loss is knowing that the forgetting is happening.

The war had started and Aleksandr and Volodymyr were among the first to die. That is why their names are remembered, why journalists wrote about them and why they are recorded here. After that, those who died became a statistic to everyone but their families and friends.

The pain outlives the flesh.

I walk down memory lane because I know I'll find you there.

Learning lines is my biggest challenge.

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end...

And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.

The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." —William Faulkner

All water has been everywhere, Bekah. What flows from your faucet was once frozen inside a glacier, and squeezed by unimaginable pressures at the bottom of the deepest sea, and rippling in a lightless lake in a cavern no living thing has ever touched. Also, it has almost certainly been inside a dinosaur. All water is one water, and all water remembers the past.

The loss of memory is the loss of identity, Rebekah. If you can't remember who you are, you are at risk of becoming someone else.

Don't cry for me, Argentina.

And then there are the ex-girlfriends. They look incredible, every one of them.

Sabemos lo que nos espera: el futuro nos aguarda allí enfrente, como reja de hierro forjado, y el pasado nos ataca desde la retaguarda como un dóberman perverso, solo que nunca se da por vencido.

In the end, every man's life is but a tale told to him that's lived it, and to him alone.