Quotes About Memory

Once a man has lived under arms, I suspect he is marked for life.In fact I have heard it remarked that old soldiers never die; they just fade away.

Quite without thought, he glanced at his left hand, and saw the ghost of the scar at the base of his thumb, the "C" so faded that it was scarcely visible. He had not noticed it or thought of it in years, and felt suddenly as though there was not air enough to breathe.

Cows? he asked, Was it really cows, or was I dreaming?

Had it really happened, that memory? Or was it only his desire that now and then brought her so vividly to life, in snatched moments that left him desperate with longing but strangely comforted, as though she had in fact touched him briefly?

Still, he was pleased to know that he could recall so much of the play and passed the rest of the journey pleasantly in reciting lines to himself, being careful not to snort.

All loss is one, and one loss becomes all, a single death is the key to the gate that bars memory.

We look in the mirror and see the shades of other faces looking back through the years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By blood and by choice, we make our ghosts; we haunt ourselves. Each ghost comes unbidden from the misty grounds of dream and silence.

All loss is one, and one loss becomes all, a single death the key to the gate that bars memory.

I think sometimes the dead cherish us, as we do them

It was in kindness that the thought came to me now, whether it was truly spoken, or only called forth from my exhausted memory for what comfort the words might hold. Everyone makes choices, and no one knows what may be the end of any of them. If my own was to blame for many things, it was not to blame for everything. Nor was harm all that had come of it.

The words were before him, and yet I thought he wasn't reading them from the paper, but from the pages of his memory, from the open book of his heart.

Father to son. And with that thought, all the disconnected, fragmentary, scattered fancies in his brain dropped suddenly into a single, vivid image: Jamie Fraser, seen from the back, looking over the horses in the paddock at Helwater. And beside him, standing on a rail and clinging to a higher one, William, Earl of Ellesmere. The alert cock of their heads, the set of their shoulders, the wide stance—just the same.

Jamie stood quite still, feeling his heart beat, watching. It was one of those strange moments that came to him rarely, but never left. A moment that stamped itself on heart and brain, instantly recallable in every detail, for all of his life. There was no telling what made these moments different from any other, though he knew them when they came.

We come and go from mystery and, in between, we try to forget. But a breeze passing in a still room stirs my hair now and then in soft affection. I think it is my mother.

A duty, she said, holding his hand between her own. The duty of a survivor. Not everyone lives to be old, but if you do, I think you owe it to those who didn't. To tell the stories of those who shared your journey… for as long as they could.

We look in the mirror and see the shades of other faces looking back through the years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway.

It's always better if they see. Then they don't imagine things. So I didn't imagine, I remembered.

It took two days, and God kens well that I recall every second of those days—yet it seems that I lost her between one heartbeat and the next. And I—I keep lookin' for her there, in that space between.

Mm. You'd forgotten how to say anything except 'I love you,' but you said that a lot.

must have stayed that way for some time; I slept sometimes, dreaming of the last few days of the Jacobite Rising—I saw again the dead man in the wood, asleep beneath a coverlet of bright blue fungus, and Dougal MacKenzie dying on the floor of an attic in Culloden House; the ragged men of the Highland army, asleep in the muddy ditches; their last sleep before the slaughter. I would wake screaming or moaning

It's the anonymity of the war that makes the killing possible. When the nameless dead are named again on tombstone and on cenotaph, then they regain the identity they lost as soldiers, and take their place in grief and memory, the ghosts of sons and lovers.

memory, making

James Fraser," he said. His eyes were fixed on William with a burning intensity, as though to absorb every vestige of a sight he would not see again. "Ye kent me once as Alex MacKenzie. At Helwater.

Fois shìorruidh thoir dha," he echoed. God rest his soul.