Quotes About Memory

It was odd to think that only a few years ago she had been Helena Greville. It seemed a lot longer. When she thought about that girl now it was as if she was thinking about someone she used to know, and know quite well, but would never see again. Helena Greville was gone for good.

Diane Setterfield

That name was Adeline March.

He was the first of my ghosts.

They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.

But you know it was here? In this house?" Aurelius shoved his hands into the depths of his pockets. His shoulders tightened. "I wouldn't expect other people to understand. I haven't got any proof. But I do know." He sent me a quick glance, and I encouraged him, with my eyes, to continue. "Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember. I can't explain it.

I believe you," I repeated, my tongue thick with all the waiting words. "I've had that feeling, too. Knowing things you can't know. From before you can remember." And there it was again! A sudden movement in the corner of my eye, there and gone in the same instant.

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

Since we are on the topic of ravens, a collective noun for ravens is an unkindness. This is somewhat puzzling to Thought and Memory.

but death so rapidly undoes a person, and the detail of her face was hard to recall in any ordinary way.

I wonder if those in Silicon Valley who shave stones to their essence and put them in machines of memory perhaps already know somehow that stones have always managed information.

Memory is like a rope, knotted every three or four feet, and hanging down a deep well. When you pull it up, just about anything might be attached to those knots. But you'll never know what's there if you don't pull. And the more you pull at that rope, the more you find.

Your memory rope may not contain a precise, photographic accounting of past events, because those moments become lost within seconds of anything that occurs. But still, your honest (if not accurate) memories will be attached to those knots, and those honest memories—along with reflection, examination, reconsideration—are precisely what the memoirist has to offer.

While I have been writing I have lived in the past, the light of it has been all around me...

As long as I live I shall remember that silent minute.

I wasn't merely remembering, it seemed to be trapped inside my eyelids.

when we go someplace, we leave a part of our energy there and we influence more than we can ever imagine.

Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is, 'I know this feeling. I was here before.

Longing on a large scale makes history.

Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

In committing a work to memory we make it safe from decay. It stands untouched. Children memorize parts of stories their parents tell them. They want the same story again and again. Don't change a word or they get terribly upset. This is the unchanged narrative every culture needs in order to survive.