Quotes About Memory

Unstuck her in time, day-sleeping in her bedroom. How old was she? Seven, seventeen, twenty-seven? Dusk or dawn? Couldn't tell by the light outside. Checked her phone. Evening. The house silent, her mother probably asleep. Out through the smell of her grandfather's fifty years of National Geographic, shelved in the hall.

The dream recedes, but leaves a residue.

The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal parts shooting off against the wall of salt-rotten cloth gave, then was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger's memory, the drive held.

Olga came home, but she never came back to life behind those blue eyes. They tried, of course, but the more they tried, the more tenuous she became, and, in their hunger to know, they spread her thinner and thinner until she came, in her martyrdom, to fill whole libraries with frozen aisles of precious relics. No saint was ever pared so fine. (Hinterlands)

My Johnny, see, he was smart, real flash boy. Started out as a stash on Memory Lane, chips in his head and people paid to hide data there.

Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn't kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory.

Proust cookies. It was literally all he knew of Proust, though he'd once had to listen to someone's lengthy argument that Proust had either described madeleines incorrectly or been describing something else entirely.

When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well. Surely

I spent the war in Lisbon, you know," Deane said, putting the gun down. "Lovely place, Lisbon.

But this feeling had come, that day, and swallowed everything up inside it, so big you couldn't really prove it was there except by an arithmetic of absence and the memory of better days.

you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.

The old man reminded Tito of those ghost-signs, fading high on the windowless sides of blackened buildings, spelling out the names of products made meaningless by time.

They seem to have accepted that she's gone." "I don't see how they could be sure she is. But I wish we'd known. Could've brought some flowers." "Daedra never suggested this. It seems to be a surprise." "A surprise funeral? You do that, here?" "A first, for me.

My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in you.

She remembers an eerily young Sean Connery, in that first James Bond film, using fine clear Scottish spit to paste one of his gorgeous black hairs across the gap between the jamb and the door of his hotel room.

The air was heavy with unspoken knowledge. Sam twisted and the obscene word shot out of him. --dance? Memory of the dance that none of them had attended shook all four boys convulsively.

Some things need no study, no learning, no repetition in pursuit of memory. They burn themselves into the eye and can be examined ever after in minute detail. Moreover it is their nature - as we cannot even think, without leaving a mark somewhere on the cosmos - to bring with them their own inescapable interpretation.

People don't remember me. Really. It's not a paranoid thing; I just have this habit of slipping through memories. It doesn't bother me all that much, except I guess that's a lie; it does. For some reason, I test very high on forgettability.

It's not important, believe me; the past has a way of being past.

But my mind is like a thin line; it travels badly. I go from thought to thought but not with logic, and I forget things [...]

he didn't forget this either. He just didn't remember it in time. . . . 

For the pedant, dates are deities, worthy of worship, but for the true social historian, they are minutiae only, a shorthand, convenient reminders and no more. You do not ask a Titanic survivor, 'Let me see now, just exactly when was that?' You ask him this: 'What was it like? How did you feel?' And that is the job of the social historian: to make the past vibrant for the present; to emotionally involve those of us who were not there. And to make us understand.

How Buttercup slid from her womb was, of course, beyond her. But she had been there when it happened; that was enough for her.

People don't remember me. Really. It's not any paranoid thing; I just have this habit of slipping through memories. It doesn't bother me all that much, except I guess that's a lie; it does. For some reason, I test very high on forgettability.