Quotes About Memory

Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.

They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.

When people die, Vargas - I mean the people you will always remember, the ones who changed your life - they never really go away, Pepe told the young doctor.

Because who can describe the look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death?

Nostalgia! Miss Frost cried. You´re nostalgic! She repeated. Just how old are you, William? She asked. Seventeen, I told her. Seventeen! Miss Frost cried, as if she'd been stabbed. Well, William Abbott, if you're nostalgic at seventeen, maybe you are going to be a writer!

On his bedside table, between the reading lamp and the telephone, was his battered copy of David Copperfield. Homer didn't have to open the book to know how the story began. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show, he recited from memory.

Juan Diego lived there, in the past—reliving, in his imagination, the losses that had marked him.

The way you remember or dream about your loved ones - the ones who are gone - you can't stop their endings from jumping ahead of the rest of their stories. You don't get to choose the chronology of what you dream, or the order of events in which you remember someone. In your mind - in your dreams, in your memories - sometimes the story begins with the epilogue.

Loved ones leave us and we go on—ghosts or no ghosts, my way or Molly's, we still see them. As Matthew and I knew, the dead don't entirely go away—not if you see them on the subway, or in your heart.

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't.

Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

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.

From that moment on, he would never stop seeing her, not in his minds eye - not whenever he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. She would always be there.

What a power I had discovered! I felt certain I could refill those bleacher seats—one day, I was sure, I could "see" everyone who'd been there; I could find that special someone my mother had waved to, at the end.

never spoke of it. He took the miracle to his grave. All Andrew ever said about the voyage was that a nun had taught him how to play mah-jongg. Something must have happened during one of their games.

Nana never remembered where you stopped reading, and wherever you started Moby-Dick, Mildred Brewster knew exactly where she was in the story. What my grandmother didn't know was where she was in her own story.

It's not the tattoos, my dear boy," Jack's father said, standing naked before him—the shocking white of William's hands and face and neck and penis being the only parts of him that weren't an almost uniform blue-black, some of which had faded to gray. "It's everything I truly heard and felt—it's everything I ever loved! It's not the tattoos that marked me.

The past is everlasting.

I was four, and I sincerely believe that this is my first memory of life itself – as opposed to what I was told happened, as opposed to the pictures other people have painted for me.

Do not forget the past; forgive the past.

If your first day of school, like your first tattoo, is a pilgrim experience—well, here was Jack's.

I actually remember my grandfather better as a woman than as a man.

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;

You oughta carry a calculator," Emma told him, "or at least write everything down.