Quotes About Memory

Death is ear-splitting, it's shattering with absence; over time, it's quieter.

Emily said ... Well, I read that it's important to sleep. While you sleep, the hippopotamus in your brain replays things that happend during the day, e.g. what you studied. So therefore it remembers it for you.

The world forgets easily, too easily, what it does not like to remember.

Civilisation hangs suspended, from generation to generation, by the gossamer strand of memory. If only one cohort of mothers and fathers fails to convey to its children what it has learned from its parents, then the great chain of learning and wisdom snaps. If the guardians of human knowledge stumble only one time, in their fall collapses the whole edifice of knowledge and understanding.

A Latin teacher told me I might make a good actress, and that stuck in my memory. I did some modeling, and Polanski gave me that small part.

It's funny, how one can look back on a sorrow one thought one might well die of at the time, and know that one had not yet reckoned the tenth part of true grief.

It's like you miss a year of your life,

My memory begins with my anger.

Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering? That is another question that will remain unanswered: I feel as though I am made of nothing else.

Inevitably, with memory comes pain.

After the first death there is no other.' - Elizabeth Barrett Browning The first death changes everything, and all deaths afterward bring us back to the first death.

The caseworkers told her she was too young to remember being there, but they were wrong. She remembered the floorboards, sticky with blood, the terrifying sound of the fridge, the unstoppable thirst, and the endless blackness that came and lasted so long as she sat with her mother who would not waken.

I WOKE WITH a start, my head hurting, aching all over. For a moment I didn't know where I was. Indeed, I felt so fuddled I didn't even know who I was. Hetty Feather, Sapphire Battersea, Emerald Star? I had three names now.

This is how the time moves - an hour here, a day somewhere, and then it's night and then it's morning. A clock ticking on a shelf. A small child running to school, a father coming home. Time moves over us and past us, and the feeling of lips pressed against lips fades into memory. A picture yellows at its edges. A phone rings in an empty room.

Something about memory. It takes you back to where you were and lets you just be there for a time.

Age will do that to you. Soon as something starts coming to your mind, it snatches it back. Makes you forget the stuff you want to remember. Brings back the memories you're busy trying to forget.

Some evenings, I kneel toward Mecca with my uncle. Maybe Mecca is the place Leftie goes to in his mind, when the memory of losing his arm becomes too much. Maybe Mecca is good memories, presents and stories and poetry and arroz con pollo and family and friends... Maybe Mecca is the place everyone is looking for... It's out there in front of you, my uncle says. I know I'll know it when I get there.

In our yearbook, there is a picture of me and Miah - sitting in Central Park - Miah has his lips poked out and is about to kiss me on my cheek. And I'm looking straight into the camera laughing. Two and half years have passed, and still, this is how I remember us. This is how I will always remember us. And I know when I look at that picture, when I think back to those few months with Miah, that I did not miss the moment.

But I don't want to read faster or older or any way else that might make the story disappear too quickly from where it's settling inside my brain, slowly becoming a part of me. A story I will remember long after I've read it for the second, third, tenth, hundredth time.

For a long time, my mother's wasn't dead yet. Mine could have been a more tragic story. My father could have given in to the bottle or the needle or a woman and left my brother and me to care for ourselves - or worse, in the care of New York City Children's Services, where, my father said, there was seldom a happy ending. But this didn't happen. I know now that what is tragic isn't the moment. It is the memory.

That's why I don't buy it when people say children don't know. That they're too young to understand. If they can walk and talk, they can understand. You look at how much growing a baby does in the first few years of its life—crawling, walking, talking, laughing. The brain just changing and changing. You can't tell me all of it's not becoming a part of their blood. Their memory.

Ms. Johnson says each day holds its own memory - its own moments that we can write about later. She says we should always look for the moments and some of them might be perfect, filled with light and hope and laughter. Moments that stay with us forever and ever.

The sign for believe flashed into my head—the way Sean signed it—his pointer finger against the side of his head like he's saying "think," then his hands coming together—like the sign for marry. I stood there thinking, for the first time, about how perfect that word was—to have a thought in your head and then to marry it, to take it into your heart forever . . . "I can't believe

Do you remember . . . ? someone's always asking and someone always does.