Quotes About Memory

there are defining moments in one's life when you learn a lot about yourself, and you deposit that knowledge in the experience account, so you can draw on it at some later date.

Dead men's words are so much more powerful than those of the living

This can't be true but I remember it.

But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

The window was still open," Mr Lisbon said. "I don't think we'd ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close that window or else she'd go on jumping out of it forever.

My house fly theory is related to my theory about why time seems to go faster as you get older. Why's that? the girl asked. It's proportional, Leonard explained. When you're five, you've only been alive a couple thousand days. But by the time you're fifty, you've lived around twenty thousand days. So a day when you're five seems longer because it's a greater percentage of the whole.

Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.

Once you've visited the underworld, you never forget the way back.

But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant …) Spring

Na kraju nije bilo bitno koliko su godina imale niti da su bile cure, nego samo da smo ih voljeli, a one nisu ?ule naš zov; ne ?uju nas ni danas, dok ih prorije?ene kose i salastih trbuha iz ku?ice na drvetu dozivamo da iza?u iz soba, kamo su otišle da zauvijek budu same - same u samoubojstvu, a samoubojstvo je dublje od smrti - i gdje mi nikad ne?emo na?i djeli?e da ih nanovo sklopimo.

The Lisbon girls were thirteen (Cecelia), and fourteen (Lux), and fifteen (Bonnie), and sixteen (Mary), and seventeen (Therese).

Next to it were five potted photographs of the Lisbon girls, pinned with rusty tacks. We didn't remember putting them up, but there they were, dim from time and weather so that all we could make out were phosphorescent outlines of the girls' bodies, each a different glowing letter of an unknown alphabet.

Ma már nem érdekel az örökké tartó hírnév, és az se, hogy tökéletes könyvet írjak. Megelégszem azzal, ha csak emléket állít képtelen életemnek.

Ha egyszer megjártad az alvilágot, soha többé nem felejted el a visszavezetÅ' utat.

I hadn't gotten old enough to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead.

The moments that led up to me fell into place as though decreed. Which, I guess, is why I think about them so much.

Looking back now, I can only remember a time when the world seemed to have a million eyes, silently opening wherever I went. Most of the time they were camouflaged, like the closed eyes of green lizards in green trees. But then they snapped open -- on the bus, in the pharmacy -- and I felt the intensity of all that looking, the desire and desperation.

When you're five, you've only been alive a couple thousand days. But by the time you're fifty, you've lived around twenty thousand days. So a day when you're five seems longer because it's a greater percentage of the whole.

Little by little he'd change; he'd get older; everything he felt now would fade into memory and then into nothing.

I was extracted, spanked, and hosed off, in that order. They wrapped me in a blanket and put me on display among six other infants, four boys, two girls, all of them, unlike me, correctly tagged. This can't be true but I remember it: sparks slowly filling a dark screen. Someone had switched on my eyes.

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead.

How long could we remain true to the girls? How long could we keep their memory pure? As it was, we didn't know them any longer, and their new habits—of opening a window, for instance, to throw out a wadded paper towel—made us wonder if we had ever really known them, or if our vigilance had been only the fingerprinting of phantoms.

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time-traveling. In this life we grow backwards.