Quotes About Memory

After all, how many of us had tried to forget something traumatic...only to find it printed on the back of our eyelids, tattooed on our tongues?

Scars are just a treasure map for pain you've buried too deep to remember.

Missed opportunities were never superficial wounds; they cut straight to the bone.

My mother moves so fast I do not even see it coming. But she slaps my face hard enough to make my head snap backward. She leaves a print that stains me long after it's faded. Just so you know: shame is five-fingered.

I pointed to the wound. It's missing, I said. My grandmother smiled, and that was all it took for me to stop seeing the scar, and to recognize her again. Yes, she said. But see how much of me is left?

But I didn't frame it; I put into an envelope and sealed it and stuffed it far back into a corner drawer of a filing cabinet. It's there, just in case one of these days I start to lose her. There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn't the first thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoon when I can't quite recall anymore where the freckles were on her right shoulders. Maybe one of these days, I will not be able to listen to the sound of snow falling and hear her footsteps.

A bruise is how the body remembers it's been wronged.

Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.

Betrayal was a stone beneath a mattress of thr bed you shared, something you felt digging into you no matter how you shifted position. What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget?

How can you be a survivor, when you can't even remember the war?

For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love.

It's like picking up an unfamiliar piece of sheet music & starting to stumble through it, only to realize it is a melody you'd once learned by heart, one you can play without even trying.

I never said I do not remember, my grandmother corrects. I said I prefer to forget.

Each memory is like a paper flower stowed up a magician's sleeve: invisible one moment and then so substantial and florid the next I cannot imagine how it stayed hidden all this time. And like those paper flowers, once they've been let loose in the world, the memories are impossible to tuck away again.

I could not remember my first kiss, but I could have told you Charlotte would be my last.

There is a fine line between seeing something that's lost as missing, and seeing it as something that might be found.

I realize how quickly lies compound. They cover like a coat of paint, one on top of the other, until you cannot remember what color you started with.

memory is linked to strong emotion, and that negative moments are like scribbling with permanent marker on the wall of the brain. But there's a fine line between a negative moment and a traumatic one. Negative moments get remembered. Traumatic ones get forgotten, or so warped that they are unrecognizable

I think people assume death is all or nothing. Someone is here, or they're not. But that's not what it's like, is it? The echo of you is still here—in your children or grandchildren; in the art you made while living; in the memories other people have of you.

Witness testimony is always flawed. It's better than circumstantial evidence, sure, but people aren't camcorders; they don't record every action and reaction, and the very act of remembering involves chosing words, actions and images. In other words, any witness who was supposed to be giving a court facts is really just giving them a version of fiction.

There are some things, I think, you're btter off not remembering.

It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you're alone. It feels less like a wound, more like a poultice.

you never forget your first fall.

History could hover, like a faint perfume or a memory stamped on the back of one's eyelids.