Quotes About Memory

Will they remember us, Aravan? Will Mankind remember us at all? ... Mayhap, Gwylly, mayhap. Mayhap in their legends and their fables. Mayhap in naught but their dreams.

Waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present.

Those who did remember probably shrugged off the chill of her memory, turned their heads down to the sports page or up toward the approaching bus. The world is a terrible place, they thought. Bad things happen every day. My bus is late.

It had occurred to Sean once - on a bender about ten years before with some buddies, Sean and a bloodstream full of bourbon turning philosophical - that maybe they HAD gotten in that car. All three of them. And what they now thought of as their life was just a dream state. That all three of them were, in reality, still eleven-year-old boys trapped in some cellar, imagining what they'd become if they ever escaped and grew up.

She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.

We live in a world of disposable memory, nothing's built to last, not even shame.

He'd told his son recently that life was luck. But life, he'd come to realize as he aged, was also memory. The recollection of moments often proved richer than the moment themselves.

This was the photograph, I knew, that had already burned its way into my dreams and my shadows, into that part of my mind that I have no control over. Its image would reappear in all its wanton cruelty for the rest of my life, particularly when I was least prepared for it.

Joe closed his hand over the watch and it was still warm from his father's pocket, ticking against his palm like a heart.

Work and its results always outlived those who labored at it as any Egyptian slave-ghost will tell you.

Another long pull of the sawteeth across the pink folds of his brain, and Teddy had to bite down against a scream and he heard Rachel's screams in there too with the fire and he saw her looking into his eyes and felt her breath on his lips and felt her face in his hands as his thumbs caressed her temples and that fucking saw went back and forth through his head— don'ttakethosefuckingpills

That's what ghosts are—they're testaments to what never should have happened and must be fixed before their spirits leave this world.

I'm just bones in a box, Teddy.

She couldn't adapt to the present, to who they were now, warts and all, so she drove winding lanes into the past to warm herself.

There is no street with mute stones and no house without echoes. —Góngora

En mis primeros recuerdos aparece el fuego.

You ever hear of Little Christmas?" he asked her. "'Course," she said. "January sixth." "Nobody remembers it anymore." "Meant something in my time," she said. "My old man's too." Her voice picked up a tone of distracted pity. "Not yours, though." "Not mine," Bob agreed and felt a trapped

That the thought of what could have been his life sometimes haunted him, hovered around approaching corners, rode the breeze like the echo of a name called from a window.

We live in a world of disposable memory. Nothing's built to last, not even shame.

that parish which allows the living to grasp the no longer cold hand of the beloved dead

Human beings tend to much more quickly forget the good others have done for them than the bad others have done to them. That's human nature.

Remembering—the good others have done, the evil others have done, and one's moral obligations—is an indispensable aspect of a good and meaningful life.

Suffering is no guarantee of empathy and the decent behavior it engenders. When people emerge from pain and oppression, they have two options: they can use their anger over their suffering to legitimize their oppression of others; or they can use the memory of their pain to empathize with others. Suffering ennobles only those who want to be ennobled by it.

Remembering—the good others have done, the evil others have done, and one's moral obligations—is an indispensable aspect of a good and meaningful life. Who are we, if not our memories? I