Quotes About Memory

Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad of Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water.

Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

You think back. And often it seems more real than now. I mean, here I am, like this, but in my mind it's like I was different. Young, you see. You never really believe you're not anymore.

Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.

Enough of Jasper. It should be clear by now how he fits into the scheme of things. Lover to begin with, sparring partner always, father of my child; our lives sometimes fusing, sometimes straying apart, always connected. I loved him once, but cannot remember how that felt.

As saudades não vencem o medo.

Some drink to forget, I drink to remember. I drink in order to understand what I mean and to discover what I know. Under its benign influence all the stories and dramas which properly belong to the sphere of art are announced by me in conversation.

The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered.

Since there was no picture of the old country in our house and since I didn't have one etched in my mind, the old country came to mean my grandmother. Whatever it was, she was. Whatever she was, it was.

The old country. That phrase came up now and then. A phrase that seemed to have a lock on it. I knew it meant Armenia, but it made me uneasy. If I asked about the old country, the adults would change the subject. Once my mother said, 'It's an ancient place, it's not really around anymore.' Where had it gone? I asked myself.

My grandmother's hands floated like wings of bone in the dark, then they were birds, then small disks of light and then bones again, and then it was dawn.

I came to realize that my grandmother's stories were part of time and not part of time, part of place and not part of place, part of the stuff that is stored in the mind's honeycomb.

I realized that in order to touch the woman behind the grandmother I knew, the one who never spoke in a direct way about her past, I had to bring the pain of the past into the landscape of the present.

I had been privy to some of her intense sensory images, to her telescopic memory, to Genocide flashbacks. This was how she told me about her past. I think it was the only way she knew to speak to me about something she wanted to say, but couldn't say in any other language to a young boy, her eldest grandson.

Had I been a witness to a memory of hers so terrible that it could only be said to me, an eleven-year-old, half delirious with fever, lying in bed between darkness and light? My grandmother had spoken so emphatically that day, in clipped, deliberate speech, as if to say, 'This is a moment to listen.

What did it mean for a whole civilization to be expunged from the earth? What did it mean when a people who loved and worked and built a culture on the land where they had lived for three thousand years were destroyed? What did it mean for the human race?

When we were apart and I thought of her, I left words out of it. What came to mind instead were flashes of bold color in sunlight. And always an impression of wide-open country and the pair of us traveling, alone together, great distance at great speed.

The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.

The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future. It's depressing if you spend too much time reliving the old joys. You think you'll never have anything as good again.

What had once seemed shallow and tedious now loomed in memory like paradise.

There are no old movies really - only movies you have already seen and ones you haven't.

I remember so many things [. . .] The problem is, only half of them are true . . . and the half which is true keeps changing places with the half which is false.

Once, when I was slicing bread, my knife slipped; instantly, I remembered how in the morning she used to cut thin slices of bread and pour warm milk on them for the children.

Ansioso observaba sus propios pensamientos, siempre dispuesto a frenarlos. No quería olvidar ya nada más y repetía mentalmente los momentos recién pasados, como se repasan las palabras de una lengua extraña.