Quotes About Memory

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration, like an albino. LIke the albino it has no protective coloration. White. That is the color. Those placid, untroubled winter months are different shades of white in my memory, unsullied, and pure. But nature in the temperate zones is bitter towards all things white.

found myself closing my eyes and walking the airy streets of Waterford made weightless by the buoyancy of my nostalgia.

I would say, "Breathe deeply," and you would breathe and remember that smell for the rest of your life, the bold, fecund aroma of the tidal marsh, exquisite and sensual, the smell of the South in heat, a smell like new milk, semen, and spilled wine, all perfumed with seawater. My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of indrawn tides.

Our grandfather, in dreamless sleep beneath us, spoke to us from the singing hive of memory.

I ordered a Manhattan, honoring the island on which I sat, and only when I tasted the ghastly concoction did I remember why I had never developed a fondness for that particular cocktail.

As Tradd approached me I turned my back toward him and found myself facing an antique mirror that reflected our three images in tarnished

I want to be lovely in death...

one afflicted with all the hurt and burden and grandeur of memory. I wondered if they could see the difference.

When a man dies, and his children die with him, then he is dead entirely, leaving nothing to show.

No song, no peace, no poetry, no end of days, and no forgetting.

Morgan, he whispered, I wish you had not been someone I loved so.

In sixteen years since then, she had changed beyond recognition, and he had not changed by a moment, being the same dispassionate, thin-haired wraith who had picked her up with his bony hands and tucked her into a book bag to add to the acquisitions of the royal library.

Easier to understand the wind . . . Easier to walk on the surface of the frothing sea, than to remember the hunger to do it. Easier to remember knowledge than ignorance, experience than innocence. Easier to know what you are than remember what you were.

Patricia H. Rushford

I don't understand what has happened. But that is has happened—that I know. It is a framed moment, not a story, but something much smaller, a spark of meaning I will return to all my life. The DNA of identity. What, much later, I learn is a vignette, a photo frayed at the edges, its old silver frame stowed in the dark attic of the mind.

This is how memory works: not as a transcription but as an attempt—as an essay is an attempt . . . to locate meaning between the irretrievable then and the equally unfathomable now.

Nothing is perfect for long, though sometimes it's perfect for a little while. It can only be pried out of the moment, sequestered between the red leatherette covers where it begins its career as a memory. Bits of reality are pressed to the pages like wildflowers, flattened and faded, but there.

The dusky and faintly sweet smell of her perfume came to Therese again, a smell suggestive of dark green silk, that was hers alone, like the smell of a special flower.

January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory:

Thinking no more about it, he stepped off into that cool space, that fast descent to her, with nothing in his mind but a memory of a curve of her shoulder, naked, as he had never seen it.

Don't you want to forget it, if it's past? I don't know. I don't know just how you mean that. I mean, are you sorry? No. Would I do the same thing again? Yes. Do you mean with somebody else, or with her? With her, Therese said.

Once the back of their hands brushed on the table, and Therese's skin there felt seperately alive and rather burning. There could not understand it, but it was so. Therese glanced at her face that was somewhat turned away, and again she knew that instant of half-recognition. And knew, too, that it was not to be believed. She had never seen the woman before. If she had, could she had forgotten?

and the night became another of those islands in time, suspended somewhere in the heart or in the memory, intact and absolute.

He had illuminated the heartbreaking cruelty of war: When men who fight become nothing, only packages of bones and blood deposited in the earth with no clarion call to memory, those they love are left without a way to make such devastating loss hold meaning.