Quotes About Memory

I traveled with my work. I went to Paris, Boston, Rome, São Paolo, Berlin, Madrid, Tokyo. I wanted to fill my mind with human faces, in order to forget Isobel's. But I achieved the opposite effect. By studying the entire human species, I felt more toward her specifically. By thinking of the cloud, I thirsted for the raindrop.

I click through her photos.

The past resides inside the present, repeating hiccuping, reminding you of all the stuff that no longer is. It bleeds out from road signs and plaques on park benches and songs and surnames and faves and the covers of books.

Negative capability…quoting Keats: "Discard your memory," he implored. "Discard the future tense of your desire; forget…both what you knew and what you want, to leave space for a new idea.

Sometimes regrets aren't based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .' She searched for the appropriate term

And besides, she knew her regrets. Regrets don't leave. They weren't mosquito bites. They itch for ever.

preserved in Nora's memory like a mosquito in amber.

Even more remarkable is his memory of beautiful moments within his ordeal. The sight of a clear, starry night sky overwhelmed him with awe. 'A view of heaven from a seat in hell.

And it was then that Nora noticed the gun, a large rifle with a hefty brown handle, leaning against the wall at the far end of the room, under the coat hooks. The sight made her feel happy, somehow. Made her feel like her eleven-year-old self would have been proud. She was, it seemed, having an adventure.

Is there a life where we are still together?

I'm sorry,' his other self said, as he sipped his wine and the sun set behind him, 'I've forgotten who you are.' 'Don't worry,' she said. 'So have I.' As she too faded away like the sun that had just been swallowed by the horizon.

Extract from "That it will never come again" by Emily Dickinson reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Lyrics from THIS MUST BE THE PLACE by David Byrne. Courtesy Index Music, Inc.

The past stays and echoes even as modernity roars ahead.

Liebe war der Weg, ewig zu leben in einem einzigen Moment

But she'll be there in the bathroom and she won't know how she got there.' 'And have you never walked into a room and wondered what you came in for? Have you never forgotten what you just did?

And have you never walked into a room and wondered what you came in for? Have you never forgotten what you just did? Have you never blanked out or misremembered what you were just doing?

The letters fading like retreating strangers in a fog.

She remembered the anti-philosophy of Mrs Elm in the Midnight Library. 'You don't have to understand life. You just have to live it.

Legacy. What a meaningless thing. All that work for a future in which they don't appear.

I don't know for sure that the words I write were the words that were actually spoken. They probably weren't. But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.

and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.

Todo era bonito (y nada dolía).

So, you see? Sometimes regrets aren't based on fact at all.

If you really want to live a life hard enough, you don't have to worry. You will stay there as if you have always been there. Because in one universe you have always been there. The book will never be returned, so to speak. It becomes less of a loan and more of a gift. The moment you decide you want that life, really want it, then everything that exists in your head now, including this Midnight Library, will eventually be a memory so vague and intangible it will hardly be there at all.