Quotes About Memory

Trust your memory. Trust your best thinking. Trust your sense of what is real.

La memoria. Sacca piena di cianfrusaglie che rotolano fuori per caso e finiscono col meravigliarti, come se non fossi stato tu a raccoglierle, a trasformarle in oggetti preziosi.

Ursula is something I will never feel again: she is Melancholy, cut into the soul and flesh.

I believe that the devil has destroyed many good books of the church, as, aforetime, he killed and crushed many holy persons, the memory of whom has now passed away; but the Bible he was fain to leave subsisting.

We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don't usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I'm saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place.

Looking back at that evening was almost better than experiencing it the first time, because it did not go faster than I could manage it, I did not have to worry about my part, and I was not distracted by doubt, because I knew how it would come out. I relived it so often, it might have happened just so that I could relive it later.

I am happy doing the work I do, alone at a desk. That work is a great part of every day. But when I am old and alone all the time, will it be enough to think about the work I used to do?

And then, there have always been days when my mind does not make connections very fast. There are always days when my mind is cloudy, or I forget things, or I feel as if I am in a different town or a different house—that something around me or about me is not normal.

She is bending over her child. She can't leave her. The child is laid out in state on a table. She wants to take one more photograph of the child, probably the last. In life, the child would never sit still for a photograph. She says to herself, "I'm going to get the camera," as if saying to the child, "Don't move.

He takes me up a few flights of stairs into an small apartment. It looks familiar to me. Any room can seem like a room remembered from a dream, as can any doorway into a second room...

She begins to write to Pierre, a sort of laboratory notebook of grief.

Once she was gone, every memory was suddenly precious, even the bad ones, even the times I was irritated with her, or she was irritated with me. Then it seemed a luxury to be irritated.

Cuando se quiere de esa manera, es muy difícil vivir con un recuerdo que no se entiende. Como lo estoy viviendo yo ahora.

Sabia que não ia voltar mas continuava pensando com tanta força. Como quando se tira um vestido velho do baú, um vestido que não é para usar, só para olhar. Só para ver como ele era. Depois a gente dobra de novo e guarda mas não se cogita em jogar fora ou dar. Acho que saudade é isso.

she couldn't remember anything after eating her

The radio was on and that was the first time I heard that song, the one I hate. Whenever I hear it all I can think of is that very day riding in the front seat with Lucy leaning against me and the smell of Juicy Fruit making me want to throw up. How can a song do that? Be like a net that catches a whole entire day, even a day whose guts you hate? You hear it and all of a sudden everything comes hanging back in front of you, all tangled up in that music.

How can there be a true History, when we see no man living is able to write truly the History of the last week?', as Sir Will demands in Thomas Shadwell's play The Squire of Alsatia (1688)

I'm never exactly a slave to facts at the best of times. But does it matter? Who owns memories after all?

In spite of the interventions of the black press, the antilynching movement, and U.S. popular culture, memories of the San Jose lynching, and the robust protest movement that followed, have disappeared. But this erasure is no anomaly: The desire to keep lynching a secret is a national pastime, and the impetus to forget is overwhelming.

I used to try and forget, now I desperately try to remember. I used to control my thoughts, now they control me. I used to fear death, now I fear life.

She would remember that voice as long as she lived, Bernadette thought. It was low and slightly harsh, as if he was hoarse from yelling at the top of his lungs all day. Yet there was a deep resonance to it, as well. It seemed to come from the soles of his feet, rumbling up through that long, tough-looking body and somehow being muted by the time it reached his throat. No, she revised the whimsical reflection; not muted, but tamed a little, civilised for the benefit of those who might hear it.

He moaned her name against her lips, and then at her temple, and her closed eyes. It seemed to be all he could say, the only word he knew. She remembered how she'd once been incensed by his lazy, mocking use of that butchered form of Bernadette, and decided she had been a pathetic little idiot.

Jimena stopped in front of a locker near a floor-length mirror. "This one was Catty's," she said softly. A watercolor painting of the full moon rising over an ocean was taped to the front. A beautiful woman hovered behind the moon, her purple robe billowing into the starry sky behind her. The image was haunting. "Did she do the painting?" Tianna asked. "It's really pretty." Jimena nodded. "She was a good artist.

Nothing is as good when you have it as it is bad when it's gone.