Quotes About Memory

I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events. - Vida Winter

Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.

Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?

Then he looked beyond the ever-shifting alteration to study the stillness of her expression. He knew his camera could not capture this - that some things were only truly seen by the human eye. This was one of the images of his lifetime. He simply exposed his retina and let love burn her flickering, shimmering, absorbed face onto his soul.

As one tends to the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so, for it must be very lonely being dead.

For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

on a summer day winter always seems like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of and not a thing you have lived.

Joe the storyteller was remembered at the Swan for a long, long time. And though eventually there came a day when the man himself was forgotten, his stories lived on.

People remembered. They wept and they grieved. In the spaces between, they were glad that the leeks were doing well this year, envied the bonnet of the neighbor's cousin, relished the fragrance of pork roasting in the kitchen on Sunday. There were those that registered the beauty of a pale moon suspended behind the branches of the elms on the ridge.

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist.

No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

The events of six months ago seemed very distant now, for on a summer day winter always seems like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of and not a thing you have lived.

Me pasé la mañana luchando con la sensación de volutas descarriadas de un mundo intentando filtrarse por las grietas de otro. ¿Conocéis la sensación de empezar un libro nuevo antes de que el recuerdo del último haya tenido tiempo de cerrarse detrás de vosotros? Deja uno el libro anterior con ideas y temas —personajes incluso— atrapados en las fibras de la ropa y cuando abre el libro nuevo siguen ahí.

Seventeen years being neither a very short nor a very long time, Phillip was remembered and misremembered in equal measure.

endings that are muted, but which echo longer in the memory than louder, more explosive denouements.

Death and memory are meant to work together. Sometimes something gets stuck and then people need a guide or companion in grief.

He saw her not here in this room and not now in this hour but in the infinity of memory.

Everybody has a story

He raised his head to work out whether the memory was genuine or whether it was some reverse echo by which the present seems to duplicate itself in the past.

The cat, I remember.

Then something rang a bell in his mind. What

Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won't be the truth; it will be a story.

We cannot know what entering sleep feels like, for by the time it is complete the ability to register it to memory is lost. But we all know the gently plummeting feeling that precedes falling asleep and gives it its name.

He raised his head to work out whether the memory was genuine or whether it was some curious reverse echo by which the present seems to duplicate itself