Quotes About Memory

Was it as if a girl sound asleep, saying nothing, hearing nothing, said everything to and heard everything from an old man who, for a woman, was no longer a man?

In the spray the girl stood naked. The facts were different, but in the course of time Eguchi's mind had made them so. As he grew old, the hills of Kyoto and the trunks of the red pines in gentle clusters could sometimes bring the girl back to Eguchi; but memories as vivid as tonight's were rare. Was it the youth of the sleeping girl that invited them?

Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?

It was a triviality, but the girl whose breast had been wet with blood had taught him that a man's lips could draw blood from almost any part of a woman's body; and, although afterwards Eguchi had avoided going to that extreme, the memory, the gift from a woman bringing strength to a man's whole life, was still with him, a full sixty-seven years old.

I know a man who photographed the view he saw from the window of the room where he made love and not the face of the woman he loved there.

The memory of my father is wrapped up in white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day of work. Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits out of his hat, he drew love from his small body.

The echo of a great love is like the echo of a huge dog's barking in an empty Jerusalem house marked for demolition.

Now and then, I remember you in times Unbelievable. And in places not made for memory But for the transient, the passing that does not remain.

My girlfriend forgot her love on the sidewalk like a bicycle. All night outside, in the dew.

I feel sad that he's just a voice now.

What isn't remembered never happened. Memory is merely a record...you just need to rewrite that record.

You're a library of me.

He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.

It was a kiss from the past.

Nostalgia is a luxury.

If someone asked her just then what memory was, what the purest definition of memory was, she would say this: the street you were on when you first jumped in a pile of dead leaves. She was walking it right now. With every fresh crunch came the memory of previous crunches. She was permeated by familiar smells: wet woodchip and gravel around the base of the tree, newly laid turd underneath the cover of soggy leaves. She was moved by these sensations.

He smiles shyly at Leah. Aged ten he had a smile! Nathan Bogle: the very definition of desire for girls who had previously only felt that way about certain fragrant erasers. A smile to destroy the resolve of even the strictest teachers, other people's parents. Now she sees ten-year-olds and cannot believe they have inside them what she had inside her at the same age.

all the dutiful grandchildren and great-grandchildren lingering over deathbeds with digital recorders, or else mechanically pursuing their ancestors through the online genealogy sites at three in the morning, so very eager to reconstitute the lives and thoughts of dead and soon-to-dead men, though they may regularly screen the phone calls of their own mothers. I am of that generation. I will do anything for my family except see them.

You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead.

Once they were the same age. Now Leah is aging in dog years. Her thirty-five is seven times his, and seven times more important, so important he has to keep reminding her of the numbers, in case she forgets.

Secondo l'esperienza di Archie, qualunque cosa dotata di memoria lunga mantiene i rancori, e non va per niente bene tenere animaletti domestici con ragioni di rancore (quella volta mi hai dato il cibo sbagliato, quell'altra mi hai fatto il bagno).

Happy is the novelist," claims Nabokov, "who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

A dream was a house your brain made without your permission, precisely to preserve memories and experiences and wayward impulses for all eternity, even the dead ones that only caused you pain, the ones from which you most wanted to be free.

She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her.