Quotes About Memory

Much missed by… Why were there no words that felt? Words that when you touched them you'd feel what was intended? The chasm left by the loss of Madeleine? The lump in the throat that fizzed and ached. The terror of falling asleep knowing that on waking she'd relive the loss, like Prometheus bound and tormented each day. Everything had changed. Even her grammar. Suddenly she lived in the past tense. And the singular.

Really? You have that ability, Chief Inspector? To just forget? Lucky you." They held each other's eyes. No one with gray in their hair got there without things they'd prefer to forget. But could not.

You lost your heart, your memories, your laughter, your brain and it even took your bones. Eventually it all came back, but different. Rearranged. 'Had you known Madame

Because the present became the past, and the past grew. And got up, and followed you.

And after all it is nothing new / It is only a memory, after all / a memory of a fear.

Watching TV Mum said, 'Do you miss your dad?' and I said, 'Who?

Do you miss your dad?" And I said: "Who?

You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past.

You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all. As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.

I am six years old and instead of celebrating with birthday cakes, I chew on a piece of charcoal.

The Khmer Rogue soldier] screams a loud, shrill cry, that piercing my heart like a stake, and I imagine that this, maybe, is how Pa died. The soldier's head hangs, bobbing up and down like a chicken's... The woman raises her hammer again. I almost feel pity for him. But it is too late to let him go, it is too late to go back. It is too late for my parents and my country.

It is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now--but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived.

The repression of the memory is dependent upon and related to the suppression of feeling, for as long as the feeling persists, the memory remains vivid.

The music never leaves. Once you have it, you can't lose it.

Our great mistake in education is, as it seems to me, the worship of book-learning -- the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind.

you seldom hear, at a funeral, a friend of the deceased saying, "What do you expect, she wore L'Heure Bleue

More was lost than mere life and existence.

There stands the shadow of a glorious name.

I exaggerate a lot and I get fiction and reality mixed up, but I don't actually ever lie.

One thing I do know about death. The "better" the person, the more loving and happy and caring, the less of a gap that person's death makes.

There was panic in my eyes. I looked into my own eyes and back down at my hands. Horrid age spots, two scars. Un-Indian, nervous, lonely hands. I could see children and men and gardens in my hands.

The day my father killed off my mother was the day he stopped knowing me.

Ma wrote true stories; not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes. Our family stories and memories have been slowly reshaped, embellished, and edited to the extent that I'm not sure what really happened all the time. Lucia said this didn't matter: the story is the thing.

On the plane to Mexico City, I thought about how death shreds time. My ordinary life had vanished.