Quotes About Memory

What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered

He saw that his mother was dwelling in an alternate time, a more bearable reality.

Dr. Grant was right, the feeling no longer swallows her. Bela lives on its periphery, she takes it in at a distance. The way her grandmother, sitting on a terrace in Tollygunge, used to spend her days overlooking a lowland, a pair of ponds.

She'd told Bela that the feeling would ebb but never fully go away. It would form part of her landscape, wherever she went. She said that her mother's absence would always be present in her thoughts. She told Bela that there would never be an answer for why she'd gone.

He avoids them, for they remind him too much of the way his parents choose to live, befriending people not so much because they like them, but because of a past they happen to share.

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.

At four Bela was developing a memory. The word yesterday entered her vocabulary, though its meaning was elastic, synonymous with whatever was no longer the case. The past collapsed, in no particular order, contained by a single word.

I'm scared that the pencil sides might disappear, just as a drawing can be rubbed out by an eraser. Bengali will be taken away when my parents are no longer there. It's a language that they personify, that they embody. When they die, it will no longer be fundamental to my life.

She turns on her laptop, raises her spectacles to her face. She reads the day's headlines. But they might be from any day. A click can take her from breaking news to articles archived years ago. At every moment the past is there, appended to the present. It's a version of Bela's definition, in childhood, of yesterday.

Even those family members who continue to live seem dead somehow, always invisible, impossible to touch.

She was unprepared for the landscape to be so altered. For there to be no trace of that evening, forty autumns ago.

And so the eight months are put behind them, quickly shed, quickly forgotten, like clothes worn for a special occasion, or for a season that has passed, suddenly cumbersome, irrelevant to their lives.

the certain absence of certain foods on their plates conjuring his father's presence somehow.

She'd known him only a few years. Only beginning to discover who he was. But in another way she had known him practically all her life. After his death began the internal knowledge that came from remembering him, still trying to make sense of him. Of both missing and resenting him. Without that there would be nothing to haunt her. No grief.

Without people in the world to call him Gogol, no matter how long he lives, Gogol Ganguli will, once and for all, vanish from the lips of loved ones, and so, cease to exist. Yet the thought of this eventual demise provides no sense of victory, no solace. It provides no solace at all.

Gogol and Sonia] call up their American friends, who are happy enough to see them but ask them nothing about where they've been. And so the eight months are put behind them, quickly shed, quickly forgotten, like clothes worn for a special occasion, or for a season that has passed, suddenly cumbersome, irrelevant to their lives.

Only when things are reread, reexamined, revisited, are they understood: letters, photos, words in dictionaries.

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.

In some senses Ashoke and Ashima live the lives of the extremely aged, those for whom everyone they once knew and loved is lost, those who survive and are consoled by memory alone.

Our meals, our actions, were only a shadow of what had already happened there, a lagging ghost of where Mr. Pirzada really belonged. At

She pictures clearly the gray cement floor of her parents' sitting room, feels its solid chill underfoot even on the hottest days. An enormous black-and-white photograph of her deceased paternal grandfather looms at one end against the pink plaster wall;

Y, así, esos ocho meses quedan atrás, no tardan en difuminarse, en olvidarse, como esa prenda de ropa que nos ponemos para una celebración especial o que pertenece ya a otra temporada y que con el tiempo acaba resultando engorrosa, prescindible.

But when I come out of the woods, when I see the basket, scarcely a handful of words remain. The majority disappear. They vanish into thin air, they flow like water between my fingers. Because the basket is memory, and memory betrays me, memory doesn't hold up.

Pet names are never recorded officially, only uttered and remembered