Quotes About Memory

Als das Kind Kind war, erwachte es einmal in einem fremden Bett und jetzt immer wieder, erschienen ihm viele Menschen schön und jetzt nur noch im Glücksfall

Él piensa sobre sí mismo como si se tratara de otro; piensa sobre lo que le sucede, cuando sucede, como si ya hace mucho tiempo le hubiera sucedido a otro; y, a veces, piensa sobre uno al que ya hace mucho tiempo le sucedió algo como si fuera uno al que todavía le ha de suceder algo. Una vez él se quedó ciego.

THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME will always be controversial.

to see the real thing in the right place - it was special. It left a very important mark in my memory.

Over time, stress hormones from multitasking can damage memory centers in the brain. Focus on one task at a time for better efficiency and memory.

library! Oh, I forgot. Same thing.

Someday, I knew, I would have to forget. But I would never forgive.

Just goes to show how life leaks away when you ain't paying attention. One day you look up, look around, and the world is empty. Not empty exactly but something is wrong, there ain't no color left to life." outraged, he glared at Lucius. "Watsons long gone and Coxes moved away, Burdetts and Betheas, too. Ain't none of them good old families left. Died out or gone off to the cities, gone away like they was never here at all.

Memory is at its best when it's selective, when we have edited out the dull, the disappointing, and the disagreeable until we are left with rose-colored perfection. This is often quite inaccurate but usually very comforting. It can also be fascinating to revisit. Was it really like that? Were we really like that?

Memory is a notoriously biased and sentimental editor, selecting what it wants to keep and invariably making a few cosmetic changes to past events. With rose-colored hindsight, the good times become magical; the bad times fade and eventually disappear, leaving only a seductive blur of sunlit days and the laughter of friends. Was it really like that? Would it be like that again?

That's it. I'm asking you, I'm really asking you—how is it possible that we aren't in a permanent state of mourning?

Considering the multitude of things that happen in any one person's life, it seems fairly unlikely that those little boys remembered the incident for very long. It was an introduction to what was to come. And cruelty could never again take them totally by surprise. But I have remembered it. I have remembered it because it was the moment I learned I was not to be trusted.

It comes down to this. When we die, not only will our bodies be gone, but so will the people we remember. We live in the world, and we recall the world, and one day we won't do either anymore. The church bells will ring and the drunks will drink.

Something occurs, in the motion of the present, but it's already over. Because even then, even as she watched, she was already moving away from it, already thinking about how years from now she might tell someone about this.

And she'd apologize for what what she remembered and what she forgot. A lot depended on what they both forgot. [Montreal]

Like many things he had believed, it had all been an illusion, only true because he had been gullible enough to believe in it. In reality, it had all been as flimsy and fleeting as an optical illusion; it depended entirely on your point of view. In calendar time, perhaps, those days weren't so long ago, but in his memory they sometimes seemed as if they had been dreamed by another person in another century.

about how we are all "emigrants from a country we remember too little of," how important to us are the fragments we do remember clearly and how we spend our time trying to reconstruct ourselves from these.

Was it the age of my innocence, Or was it the lost Land of Oz? Was it only a foolish illusion, The summer that never was?

The past lies like a nightmare upon the present. —Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

How easily something you thought was safely buried in your past could suddenly come back and cut you to the quick.

Looking back, she began to wonder if perhaps it was all just a story. As the years race inexorably on, and as all the people we know and love die, does the past turn into fiction, an act of the imagination populated by ghosts, scenes and images suspended forever in water glass?

when you visit a place you used to live in for a long time, you see it differently; you become more like a tourist in your own land.

All of this could have happened, and some of it did, but not in that way.

I know this doesn't make sense, but if we ever did this before, exactly this, with you sitting over there and me here, in this same room, well, wasn't the food even better? I mean, a lot better?