Quotes About Memory

Memory is a tough place. You were there. If this is not the truth, it is also not a lie.

The brightest memory fades faster than the dullest ink.

Yes, and the body has a memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness—all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through, even as we are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to be inside, among, a part of the games.

I)n memory, remorse wraps the self.

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.

You like to think memory goes far back though remembering was never recommended. Forget all that, the world says. The world's had a lot of practice.

You cannot say— A body translates its you— you there, hey you even as it loses the location of its mouth. When you lay your body in the body entered as if skin and bone were public places, when you lay your body in the body entered as if you're the ground you walk on, you know no memory should live in these memories becoming the body of you.

After it happened I was at a loss for words. Haven't you said this yourself? Haven't you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would call you by the name of her black housekeeper? You assumed you two were the only black people in her life. Eventually she stopped doing this, though she never acknowledged her slippage. And you never called her on it (why not?) and yet, you don't forget.

The girl is Catholic with waist-length brown hair. You can't remember her name: Mary? Catherine? You never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you you smell good and have features more like a white person. You assume she thinks she is thanking you for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white person.

There are benefits to being without nostalgia. Certainly nostalgia and being without nostalgia relieve the past.

Though a share of all remembering, a measure of all memory, is breath and breathe you have to create a truce - a truce with the patience of a stethoscope.

Though a share of all remembering, a measure of all memory, is breath and to breathe and to breathe you have to create a truce— a truce with the patience of a stethoscope.

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really just say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?

If this were a domestic tragedy, and it might well be, this would be your fatal flaw--your memory, vessel of your feelings.

By landscape we also mean memory...

Time is not a single train, moving in one direction at a constant speed. Every so often it meets another train coming in the opposite direction, from the past, and for a short while that past is with us, by our side, in our present.

I'll end up believing, like him, that everything is war and every mark a scar. She ran a finger lightly over the blade of a sword temporarily hung on the wall; the line it left on her skin, though distinct, quickly vanished.

Sunt aproape mort acum. Miros t?mâie ?i mult fum . Totu?i mai aud ceva... Ani lumina, vocea ta...

Notwithstanding the memories of slavery, and in the face poverty, ignorance, terrorism, and subjugation still deeply woven into their lives, the embittered past of blacks was taken onto a much higher plane of intellectual and artistic consideration during the Renaissance.

Life moved on like a river, and water could not long remember the bruise it had received from a rock upstream.

The astronomer's rule of thumb: if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen

Wars are remembered when those who were there would rather forget.

The past is like a tattoo. Your life changes, but the tattoo is still there to remind you who you were and you forget who you are.