Quotes About Memory

Our lives are but a splash of water on a stone, nothing more. Then I am the stone on which they fell, and they have marked me. So beware, because I loved them, and they have marked me.

Even now, years later, there's only one face I see when I hear the word "beautiful." High cheekbones with alabaster skin. The most astonishing green irises set in unblinking almond eyes. Long black hair, sleek as a waterfall of onyx.

You're already seared in my memory, kiska," he murmurs. "No picture necessary.

Waterloo will wipe out the memory of my forty victories; but that which nothing can wipe out is my Civil Code. That will live forever.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

Ordinarily men exercise their memory much more than their judgment.

Those who receive the most images into their memories have the most lively imaginations.

Es gibt keine andere Unsterblichkeit als die Erinnerung, die man im Geiste der Menschen zurücklässt.

Posterity will talk of Washington as the founder of a great empire, when my name shall be lost in the vortex of revolution.

When people talk of the indelibility of a strong memory, they speak of recalling exactly where they were when Kennedy was shot or the Challenger space shuttle exploded. But what a woman really remembers is her first period; now there's a memory seared into the brain with the blowtorch of high emotion.

We lived so long and so self-consciously that we assumed we must live forever, and we buried our dead with enough talismans and spare change for eternity.

I wonder if I don't give too much of myself to writing: I am always half where I am; the other half is feeding the furnace, kick-starting the heat of creativity. I am making love with someone but at the same time I'm noticing how this graceful hand across my belly might just fit in with the memory of lilacs in Albuquerque in 1974.

When you write a memory, it isn't in the past anyway. It's alive right now.

Begin with "I remember." Write lots of small memories. If you fall into one large memory, write that. Just keep going. Don't be concerned if the memory happened five seconds ago or five years ago.

No amount of wishing will bring back the dead.

I'll never forget Jonah's face. A light poured out of him and became the spirit of the room, like a genie released from a bottle after centuries of darkness.

For a whole day I couldn't remember that Dad was dead. It was as if accepting his death would kill me, too. I lost my mind; I can admit it. If you don't go at least a little crazy when your favorite person dies, something is wrong with you.

Of course, we're made up of what we've forgotten too, what we've tried to bury or suppress.

When I think of this now, I see how the past holds us captive, its beautiful ruin etched on the mind's eye

How not to think of loss, how it takes hold and grows: like lacuna snails, slow and deliberate, on a reed? Why is everything I see the past I've tried to forget?

Waking, I am freighted with memory: my mother's last words spoken--after her death--in a dream: Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?

How can I see anything but this: how trauma lives in the sea of my body, awash in the waters of forgetting.

the poet I saw once... but whose words have long been in my mind, windows of invincible candles...

Shankpushpi: Shankpushpi is an Indian herb mentioned in Ayurvedic texts. It is regularly consumed to improve memory and sharpen the mind. In fact, many students consume it just before an exam to improve their mind's power. This is mostly consumed in syrup form and can be bought online.