Quotes About Memory

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses. Her voice, her bright body, Her infinite eyes. I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Even in memory, I am terrified by those solitudes! When foul weather is unleashed in that part of the world, the rain seems kin to the devil; the waters of the river and the sea and sky couple, bellowing. A forsaken land where even letters arrive wilted, withered by distances, where hearts petrify and are altered. from "A Dead Man's Name

A morte não é a maior perda da vida. A maior perda da vida é o que morre dentro de nós enquanto vivemos...

If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren't, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose?

Ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making. You learned to ration your commitment to them. This moment in this tent already had the quality of remembered experience. Or perhaps he was simply getting old. But then, after all, in trench time he was old. A generation lasted six months, less than that on the Somme, barely twelve weeks.

Forget. So there was my duty laid out in front of me, as simple and clear as a bowl of water: Remember.

A hundred years from now they'll still be ploughing up skulls. And I seemed to be in that time and looking back. I think I saw our ghosts.

As if you cope with loss by ingesting the dead person

But he does worry about it—in the long hours of darkness. And then, in the morning, he forgets the weakness of the night.

The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.

In some ways the experience of these young men paralleled the experience of the very old. They looked back on intense memories and felt lonely because there was nobody left alive who'd been there.

I had him in my cab once. Who? Neville asked Rupert Brooke. He was good, him. There's some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England. That would be the bit with my nose under it; just fucking drive, will you?

Achilles lives in the present. He remembers the past, not without regret, but increasingly without resentment. He rarely, if ever, thinks about the future, because there is no future. It's amazing how easily he's come to accept that. His life rests like a dandelion clock on the palm of his open hand, a thing so light the merest breath of wind can carry it away.

Perhaps pain, even other people's pain, becomes a smell you carry round with you? A

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's after image imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscure of dreams. Though their bodies would heal, their souls had sustained a damage beyond compensation

We children sat transfixed before that moon our mother had called forth from the waters. When the moon had reached its deepest silver, my sister, Savannah, though only three, cried aloud to our mother, to Luke and me, to the river and the moon, Oh, Mama, do it again! And I had my earliest memory.

Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.

I take it as an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.

Her secret, we would discover, was that once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers, that the mind can never break off from the journey.

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past. I am more fabulist than historian, but I will try to give you the insoluble, unedited terror of youth. I betray the integrity of my family's history by turning everything, even sadness, into romance. There is no romance in this story; there is only the story.

Don't go yet. Please. Tell me a story, one about us. Tell what it meant. How on earth did it happen? The story, Pat—tell it to me.

I've written more about my parents than any writer in the history of the world, and I still return to their mysterious effigies as I try to figure out what it all means—some kind of annunciation or maybe even a summing-up They still exert immense control over me even though they've been dead for so long. But I can conjure up their images without exerting a thimbleful of effort.

My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself.