Quotes About Memory

It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy -- that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.

Çok zaman?m oldu düÅŸünecek. Sana bir ÅŸey sormak istiyorum. En son çirkinlikten öncesini hat?rlayam?yorum. Çok güzel miydi Samuel? Senin gözünde güzeldi, çünkü sen kurmuÅŸtun onu. Bence sen onu hiç görmedin, kendi yarat?n? gördün sadece.

Maybe that's what ghosts are

We continually move backward and forward in time as we use our stories to describe who we were, who we are, and what we hope we will become. Storytelling

Nobody belongs to us, except in memory." (Grandparenting [1994])

Her hair had been going gray as long as he could remember; she bundled it behind in a bun held with hairpins that he frequently found on the floor when he lived boyishly close to the carpet.

Still, my fascination with Buchanan did not abate, nor was I able, as the Seventies set in, to move the novel forward through the constant pastiche and basic fakery of any fiction not fed by the springs of memory -- what Henry James calls (in a letter to Sarah Orne Jewett) the fatal cheapness [and] mere escamotage of the 'historic' novel.

She breathed that air he'd forgotten, of high-school loveliness, come uninvited to bloom in the shadow of railroad overpasses, alongside telephone poles, within earshot of highways with battered aluminum center strips, out of mothers gone to lard and fathers ground down by gray days of work and more work, in an America littered with bottlecaps and pull-tabs and pieces of broken muffler.

The reel of your real life unwound only once.

Just yesterday, it seems to him, she's stopped being pretty.

I don't recall inclement weather on a fair day.

Nadie nos pertenece, salvo en el recuerdo.

They inhabit a kind of heaven, economical as a memory.

You were never in Texas," she says.He remembers the house on that strange treeless residential street, the green night growing up from the prairie, the flowers in the window, and says, "Absolutely I was.""Doing what?""Serving Uncle.""Oh, in the Army; well that doesn't count. Everybody's been to Texas with the Army.""You order whatever you think is good," Rabbit tells Tothero.

Maybe the dead are gods, there's certainly something kind about them, the way they give you room. What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand. The more dead you know it seems the more living there are you don't know.

Rabbit wipes her chin and mouth with his handkerchief and, for weeks afterward, when all is lost, will take out this handkerchief and bury his nose in it, in its scarcely detectable smell of distant ocean.

It's five-sixths muscle memory, as you know. When muscle memory takes over, the heart can start to sing its song. Until then, you're stymied. You're just going through the motions.

By the time these words are read, the centuries-old cedar, hemlock, and balsm of the cutblock known as Leah Block 2 will be a distant memory, long since processed into siding, two-by-fours, perhaps even the paper that has been recycled into the pages of this book.

While they talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had been at another time.

Tell the truth. That way you don't have to remember a story.

I remembered the last time I put this thing into my eye it was more painful than watching old political speeches while listening to the "Macarena" and having a root canal performed by an angry, clumsy chimp.

Her past seems a span of innocuous days. And her nights? Her most dramatic recurring dream in recent nights was one in which she had difficulty opening a jar of peanut butter.

Their silhouettes lingered in her mind. So did the sound of their kisses. She rose and went to the window and looked out over the busy playground. Children running, pulling, sliding, calling, spinning. If you traced all these children back to their beginnings, you came to kisses.

This really is your life. You only have this moment. All the rest is memory (which is also here now) and anticipation (which is also happening here and now). This moment is as good as any other. In fact, it's perfect.