Quotes About Memory

Once again, I was reminded that Tally was the prettiest girl I'd ever met, and when she smiled at me my mind went blank. Once you've seen a pretty girl naked, you feel a certain attachment to her.

When you have no future, you live in the past.

A Spool of Blue Thread

Now you're trying to think like Bannick. He had a death wish, which is not unusual for serial killers. They can't stop what they're doing on their own volition, so they want someone else to stop them. The ruined reputation. The disgrace to the memory of his parents. The loss of everything he had worked for.

We never forget that we were twenty-four hours late at 9/11. This is our world. This is the pressure we're under. Sorry for the speech.

The bruises go away but the scars remain, deep, hidden, raw.

Mary never saw Bothwell again.

She was only twenty-eight. It was, wrote a chronicler

It is like remembering two different lives at once...and wondering which of them is mine...

I came to realise that my life, which had seemed so unmistakably real, consisted only of memories

Yours is a loving spirit; it should not die with you

What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has been the memory of what happened at Hiroshima. – John Hersey, quoted in Fallout by Lesley Blume

I cannot remember whether this was my decision or her command. Maintaining such fogginess about free will is, I think, a secret to a lasting marriage.

This is not to say that there are not Chicagoans. But I would suggest that they are a nomadic people, whose lost home exists only in their minds, and in the glowing crystal memory cells that they all carry in the palms of their hands: a great idea of a second city, lit with life and love, reasonable drink prices at cool bars, and, of course, blocks and blocks of bright and devastating fire.

The rule of identity is the rule of amnesia.

Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.

Don't you understand?" he would say, "You imagine the story better than I remember it.

Life, Garp wrote, is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.

In this world," Franny once observed, "just as you're trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.

And never forget, there is memory.

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don''t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time.

Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.