Quotes About Memory

The images would flash at Maria like slides in a dark room. On film they might have seemed a family.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes.

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image

Los recuerdos se borran, la memoria se adapta, la memoria se ajusta a lo que creemos recordar.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water.

So she told me she was pregnant, it was an accident, and she wanted to know what to do and I went into the ladies' room because I knew I was going to cry and I didn't want to cry in front of her and I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly and then I heard the bomb and when I finally got out part of her was in the sherbet and part of her was in the street and you, you son of a bitch, you want someone to remember her.

Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.

Not where are they now, dead seven years, But what they were then?

How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook.

I remember all of the day's misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

I have already lost touch with a couple people I used to be.

The letter is still in my makeup box but I am careful not to read it unless I am drunk

I just can't get that monster out of my mind.

I remember swimming (albeit nervously, for I was a nervous child, afraid of sinkholes and afraid of snakes, and perhaps that was the beginning of my error)

It is hard to find California now, unsettling to wonder how much of it was merely imagined or improvised; melancholy to realize how much of anyone's memory is no true memory at all but only the traces of someone else's memory, stories handed down on the family network.

It is hard to remember what we came to remember.

That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one's memory.

Everyone was younger then, and in the telling a certain glow suffuses those years.

I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.

It's all gone with you, he said. It used to be there but it's gone. Listen, she said as if by rote. I love you.

His best moment was when he walked up the majestic stairway to the second floor of the Met; he loved the glorious spaces of old exhibition halls. Not that they knew about old here, with buildings always being blasted and rebuilt higher. How did people in this city keep track of themselves, with so much coming at them at once?

It was one of the mysteries of modern life, what happened to old love.