Quotes About Memory

Every day brings a new memory of something we did a year ago. A parade of unhappy anniversaries.

But thats okay, because the history of a kid is one part fact, two parts legend, and three parts snowball. And if you want to know what it was like back when Maniac Magee roamed these part, well, just run you're hand under your movie seat and be very, very careful not to let the facts get mixed up with the truth.

You remember everything people say to you?' I locked into his eyes. 'Everything /some/ people say to me.

I remember how, as a boy, I used to collect the cork tips of my father's cigarettes and stick them in my stamp albums. I believed they contained his unspoken words, which one day would explain everything. I have not changed. Now I explore my memories, trying to discover the substructure hidden beneath my past actions, searching for the link to connect them all.

Here and there nurses directed emaciated people in striped clothes; the soldiers looked at them in sudden silence—those were the people saved from the furnaces who were returning to life from the concentration camps.

After that, Mrs. Hansen stopped visiting. Mom receded from a lot of my memories and Dad came in clearer focus, making breakfast in Mom's place, driving me to school on the days it rained. When Mom showed up, she was a force, sparkling at dinner parties, running around the kitchen cooking four-course dinners, but it seemed to cost her. She stayed at that level—50 percent of her—for a couple months.

That terrible awareness that life could twist on you in a blink wasn't something a person could forget.

And a tape recorder, spinning slow like taffy, taking down every word.

Paulie Aandeg disappeared on September 5. September 5 is my due date.

Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. These are first-person memories—I memories. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief.

And Pasquale forced himself to look away from her then. It was like prying a magnet off steel, but he did it: he turned forward in the boat, closed his eyes, still seeing her standing there in his memory. He shook with the strain of not looking back until they rounded the breakwater into the open sea and Pasquale exhaled, his head falling to his chest. You are a strange young man, Tomasso the Communist said.

Something about the memory caused him to tear up, to think again about the unknowable nature of the people we love.

but in Claire's mind it would always be Holly Golightly who stole her daddy. We belong to nobody and nobody belongs to us.

and he urges the old man to remember the last moment he felt his being without its relation to beloved Amedea, his last moment of individual happiness or longing—

Being with you let me feel, feel everything , and I needed that. I remembered better with you, I healed better with you, and you made … you made everything real.

I was fitted with a specially designed compression filter that allows excessive information to lie dormant until I need to access it. It's only the beta version, so excuse any kinks that may appear. I really can't be held responsible.

When the language one identifies with is far away, one does everything possible to keep it alive. Because words bring back everything: the place, the people, the life, the streets, the life, the sky, the flowers, the sounds. When you live without your own language you feel weightless and, at the same time, overloaded. Your breathe another type of air, at a different altitude. You are always aware of the difference.

Is that what you think of when you think of me? Gogol asks him. Do I remind you of that night? Not at all, his father says eventually, one hand going to his ribs, a habitual gesture that has baffled Gogol until now. You remind me of everything that followed.

Gogol remembers having to do the same thing when he was younger, when his grandparents died...He remembers, back then, being bored by it, annoyed at having to observe a ritual no one else he knew followed, in honor of people he had seen only a few times in his life...Now, sitting together at the kitchen table at six-thirty every evening, his father's chair empty, this meatless meal is the only thing that seems to make sense.

He tries to peel the image from the sticky yellow backing, to show her the next time he sees her, but it clings stubbornly, refusing to detach cleanly from the past.

In the days that follow, he begins to remember things about Moushumi, images that come to him without warning while he is sitting at his desk at work, or during a meeting, or drifting off to sleep, or standing in the mornings under the shower. They are scenes he has carried within him, buried but intact, scenes he has never thought about or had reason to conjure up until now.

Writing down call numbers with short pencils, searching up and down aisles that would turn dark when the timers on the lights expired. She recalls, visually, certain passages in the books she'd read. Which side of the book, where on the page.

In their silence they continued both to protect me and to punish me. The memory of that night was now the only tie between us, eclipsing everything else.

What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered, Augustine said.