Quotes About Memory

You can easily remember the effect but forget the main cause behind it.

In the Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, the reader tries to reconstruct the past through participants and witnesses to that past, but what results is a blurred, ambiguous fiction within another fiction that recounts past events in accord with individual perspectives and interests. In this case, reality becomes fiction not only because the novelist fictionalized it but because the acts of remembering are so deformed or willfully mendacious that it is itself a fiction.

La belleza, como la justicia, se nos escurre entre los dedos. Fotografiamos una puesta de sol, pero todo lo que conseguimos es el recuerdo del momento, no el instante en sí.

We read scripture in order to be refreshed in our memory and understanding of the story within which we ourselves are actors, to be reminded where it has come from and where it is going to, and hence what our own part within it ought to be.

Financial crashes happen precisely because the people who remember the last one have either died or retired and thus are no longer around, with memories and character formed by that previous experience, to warn people not to be irresponsible.

the reason we have these dreams, the reason we have a sense of a memory of the echo of a voice, is that there is someone speaking to us, whispering in our inner ear—someone who cares very much about this present world and our present selves, and who has made us and the world for a purpose which will indeed involve justice, things being put to rights, ourselves being put to rights, the world being rescued at last.

Beauty, like justice, slips through our fingers. We photograph the sunset, but all we get is the memory of the moment, not the moment itself. We buy the recording, but the symphony says something different when we listen to it at home.

Her mind is a haunted house.

To visit certain streets was to realise that only the sky remained unchanged there.

L'exil accélère l'oubli. L'exil va vite. Il suffit de quelques mois parfois, d'une année ou deux, pour que le pays qui était le sien ne soit plus le même.

Nothing's ever gone. We fool ourselves that things fade, but they never do.

To be haunted by my heart is no threat.

Taking a sip of the hot chocolate he'd made her, she met his gaze, those eerie eyes of endless black impenetrable, unreadable. "Max?" "Yes?" "Will you remember me?" His heart broke into a thousand pieces. "Always.

If that happens to us," she whispered, unable to wrap her mind around the idea of a life so long and so full of tragedy, "if we feel ourselves, who we are together, becoming lost in time, I don't want to Sleep. I want to say good-bye when I'm still me and you're still you.

Sophia got up, taking one last look at the extraordinary daughter Councilor Nikita Duncan had borne.

I will love you even when i am dust on the winds

I think, to be missed is a gift. To be remembered an even bigger one.

Sahara traced the ink with a trembling finger before she bent to press her lips to the tattoo, her touch tender, her eyes dark with emotion. "I've branded you". "You did that a long time ago".

But the past is not an old coat that can be discarded and forgotten.

When she closed the door, she took the happiness with her.

Last night, she had died.

How do I know anything? How is it that my arms stretched out in front of me are so pale? How to I even know that they should be brown like riverbank mud, as they were when I was many goddesses with many worshippers, ruling in lands on the other side of a great, salty ocean? I used to be many, but now we are one, all squeezed together, many necks in one coffle.

It was funny the way memory obliged the heart. His happy recollections were always afloat in his soupy subconscious where so many of his darker memories had sunk to the underbelly of his past and been as good as lost forever. But without conscious instruction, memory had edited and enlarged the finest moments of his life and stored them like masterpieces in the private gallery of his personal history.

To see such a glorious mind as his overthrown—it is something you never forget.