Quotes About Memory

People have never had a problem disposing of the past when it gets too difficult. Flesh will burn, photos will burn, and memory, what is that?

I read that the body remakes itself every seven years. Every cell. Even the bones rebuild themselves like coral. Why then do we remember what should be long gone? What's the point of every scar and humiliation? What is the point of remembering the good times when they are gone? I love you. I miss you. You are dead.

The missingness of the missing. We know what that feels like. Every endeavor, every kiss, every stab in the heart, every letter home, every leaving, is a ransack of what's in front of us in the service of what's lost.

He doesn't take a photo or a video because he wants to remember — by which he means he wants to misremember because the moment is made up of what the camera can't capture.

What is memory anyway but a painful dispute with the past?

Everyone remembers things which never happened. And it is common knowledge that people often forget things which did. Either we are all fantasists and liars or the past has nothing definite in it.

Isn't there always a history to the story? You think you're living in the present, but the past is right behind you like a shadow.

We did photograph albums, best dresses, favourite novels, and once someone's own novel. It was about a week in a telephone box with a pair of pyjamas called Adolf Hitler. The heroine was a piece of string with a knot in it.

I discover that grief means living with someone who is not there.

The past is magnetic. It draws us in.

Perhaps this is how it is--life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide. History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us, then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time, which returns everything, changes everything.

All time is eternally present and so all time is ours, There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming.

My grandmother whispering to herself, over and over, David is in heaven now, David is in heaven now,' my mind repeating Schrodinger's Cat, Schrodinger's Cat.

And you and me in the car where we've always been, where we'll always be, this night, this road, even when we're gone and the road is gone and the city is gone but we'll be here because everything is imprinted forever with what it once was.

But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?

Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as I start to run?

The psyche is much smarter than consciousness allows. We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.

The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

Diuen que cada floc de neu és diferent. Si això fos cert, com podria el món anar endavant? Com podríem aixecar-nos de les nostres genuflexions? Com podríem recuperar-nos d'una meravella així? Oblidant. No podem tenir massa coses al cap. Només existeix el present i no hi ha res per a recordar.

and what is memory but a rope slung across time?

What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millenia opening in your gut. What is salted up in the memory of you? Memory past and memory future.

I don't care about the facts, Domino, I care about how I feel. How I feel will change, I want to remember that.

I took them into the garden and burned them one by one and I thought how easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.

They say every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it? By forgetting. We cannot keep in mind too many things. There is only the present and nothing to remember.