Quotes About Memory

Scars are especially useful as historical markers when one's own memory and consciousness cannot be trusted.

Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You'll find what you need to furnish it—memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey. —Tad Williams

Later, she would remember these years, and realize with astonishment that she had, by fifteen, decided on most of the assumptions she would carry for the rest of her life: that people were essentially not evil, that perfection was death, that life was better than order and a little chaos good for the soul. Most important, this life was all. Unfortunately, she forgot these things, and had to remember them the hard way.

There are lines of yours I know by heart. There are scents of yours soaked in my skin.

imagine that it were given back to me to be the child who knew departure would be sweet, the boy who drew square-rigged ships, the girl who knew truck routes from ottawa to mexico, the me who found a door in latin verse and made a map out of hexameters.

Good librarians are natural intelligence operatives. They possess all of the skills and characteristics required for that work: curiosity, wide-ranging knowledge, good memories, organization and analytical aptitude, and discretion.

We are all living history, and it's hard to say now what will be important in the future. One thing's certain, though: if we throw it away, it's gone.

Most people are not really scared of death. They are merely terrified of being taken to a mortuary and/or being buried or cremated and/or being forgotten.

I had spent so much of life being afraid or living the memory of being afraid.

The mere smell of cooking can evoke a whole civilization.

The food here is so tasteless you could eat a meal of it and belch and it wouldn't remind you of anything.

When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain.

Feasting is also closely related to memory. We eat certain things in a particular way in order to remember who we are. Why else would you eat grits in Madison, New Jersey?

I forget the name of the place; I forget the name of the girl; but the wine was Chambertin.

Forgiveness changes the way we remember.

Always forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory.

You dont have to hold on to the pain, to hold on to the memory.

In Lake Wobegon, we don't forget mistakes.

Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously...drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens our entire existence.

Forgetting is the cost of living cheerfully.

The mind that too frequently forgives bad actions will at last forget good ones.

The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness.

To be wronged is nothing, unless you continue to remember it.