Quotes About Memory

Love within my being. You lived with me, breath of my breath, Being in my being, nor left my side; But now the wheel of Time has turned And you are gone – no joys abide. You

There are times in the lives of most of us when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.

Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost.

The past is never dead, it is not even past.

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

It is a common fallacy to believe that the law of large numbers acts as a force endowed with memory seeking to return to the original state, and many wrong conclusions have been drawn from this assumption.

Hands folded under my chin, I drifted. A bruise-colored cloud hung over Koko Head. A transistor radio twanged on a seawall where a Hawaiian family picnicked on the sand. The sun-warmed shallow water had a strange boiled-vegetable taste. The moment was immense, still, glittering, mundane. I tried to fix each of its parts in memory. I did not consider, even passingly, that I had a choice when it came to surfing. My enchantment would take me where it would.

How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible...

You don't learn that, she said. It's just there. It sounds like he spent his whole life trying to unlearn it. Trying to forget it.

She suddenly heard a wave of sound, cicadas and whippoorwills and crickets that just abruptly assailed her, and she wondered if they'd just begun or if they had already been calling and all she'd heard was the banjo music, ancient and myth-laden and somehow enticing, like sound seeping through the cracks of a place you couldn't get to anymore

Then what had been at the bottom of his mind all along surfaced, like a rotten log in a swamp brought up by its own putrescent gases. A headline from last summer's newspaper: LOCAL MAN INDICTED FOR MURDER. A measure of peace returned to him. A feeling of self-confidence, of being in good hands. Granville Sutter, he thought.

Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.

When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.

Those hundreds of feet were light. In washing them off, I pretended the hose was a pump. What have I missed? Childhood is a lie of poetry.

it is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

When a man is dead, they put money in his coffin, erect monuments to his memory, and celebrate the anniversary of his birthday in set speeches. Would they take any notice of him if he were living? No!

The "olden times" are only such in reference to us. The past is rendered strange, mysterious, visionary, awful from this great gap in time that parts us from it, and the long perspective of waning years. Things gone by and almost forgotten, look dim and dull, uncouth and quaint, from our ignorance of them, and the mutability of customs. But in their day—they were fresh, unimpaired, in full vigour, familiar and glossy.

In going back we must take our present selves with us: the mind has taken a different colour, and this is thrown back upon our past.

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.

But I believe if you tell a story, it's like sending a nightingale into the air with the hope that its song will never be forgotten.

It seems to me that when you look back at a life, yours or another's, what you see is a path that weaves into and out of deep shadow. So much is lost. What we use to construct the past is what has remained in the open, a hodgepodge of fleeting glimpses. our histories, like my father's current body, are structures built of toothpicks. So what I recall is a construct both of what stands in the light and what I imagine in the dark where I cannot see.