Quotes About Memory

I think it is a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. —Vladimir Nabokov

When the matriarch is gone, so is the herd's collective memory.

Amnesia was one way for the mind to protect itself from reliving something that would otherwise break you apart.

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.

Betrayal was a stone beneath the mattress of the 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?

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?"  Ã¢â'¬Â¢

Prisiminimai n?ra kapitalas, kur? turi vis? gyvenim?.Tai - tam tikra atminties kiekyb?,sukaupiama,sužadinama ir išstumiama ? s?mon?.

Brit had wanted it to say LOVED. Those were the directions she gave me for the granite carver. But at the last minute I changed it. I was never going to stop, so why make it past tense? I

you eventually make the decision to divide your life in half—before and after—with loss being that tight bubble in the middle. You can move around in spite of it; you can laugh and smile and carry on with your life, but all it takes is one slow range of motion, a doubling over, to be fully aware of the empty space at your center.

Happiness wasn't just what you reported; it was also how you chose to remember.

Sometimes, when I would share a memory of a meal, I noticed the others listening. "It's because you don't just tell stories," Darija explained. "You paint with words.

Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match.

They both knew that jealousy could rise like a tide, erasing events that had been scratched into the shore of your memory.

When Thomas left, it was with the feeling of a summer romance—a trinket that I could take out and examine for the rest of my life, the same way I might save a seashell from a beach vacation or the ticket from my first Broadway musical.

I won't forget you, Olive. No matter how hard I may try. That's not the same as being remembered. Isn't it?

The thing about death, Lacy knew, was that it robbed you of your vocabulary for comfort.

In brain scans, music lights up the medial prefrontal cortex and triggers a memory that starts playing in your mind. All of a sudden you can see a place, a person, an incident. The strongest responses to music—the ones that elicit vivid memories—cause the greatest activity on brain scans.

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

Don't you wish love was so strong it could come back to haunt you?

Well, as long as someone remembers you, you never really die.

Josie started being able to sleep through the night again, instead of waking up screaming. Part of going back to normal meant erasing the boundaries of what was abnormal, and within a few months, the way Alex had felt on 9/11 was slowly forgotten, like a tide washing out a message she'd once scrawled on the sand.

Some feel that because they lived, it's their responsibility to tell the world what happened, so it won't happen again, and so people won't forget. Others believe that the only way to go on with the rest of our lives is to act as if it never happened.

And afterward, when the leaves turned and the snow came, every now and then I would rise in everyone's minds like a tide.

There is a picture of me from that day. I saw it once on a PBS documentary about April 15, 1945, when the first British tanks approached Bergen-Belsen.