Quotes About Memory

Nobody who's lived an anyway decent amount of life remembers everything.

Her mind was like a bookcase whose shelves had been pulled away, leaving the books pell-mell. All the stories of her life were in there, only confounded one into the other.

Pieces of story she would discover intact in her. She would draw them into the air with a single phrase and be elsewhere for a moment, eyes distant and eyelashes winging as an image fleeted past. Christy would gently try and bring forth more, but like a fallen chandelier inside her the whole was shattered and beyond repair and there were only exquisite shards.

but if there's one sure way not to forget something it's to say Forget That.

This is my father's story. I am writing it to find him. But to get where you're going, you have to first go backwards. That's directions in Ireland, it's also T.S. Eliot.

Some things do not bear telling. I think my father knew this. I think he knew how words can sometimes flatten the deepest emotions or pin them like wild butterflies stunned out of magnificent flight, flimsiest souvenirs of what moved and coloured air like silk. Better to imagine it.

And in just this way the days after my father's death became weeks became months in the familiar ceaseless cruelty of time, carrying us ever forward even when we sit still. Time does not pass, pain grows." (p.223)

When he was small he held the label inside his pillowcase when he slept. Only I know that. I was not a sleeper. His hand in sleep searched to find it. He would take the label between thumb and forefinger and just move it slightly against itself, over and back, as if the smallest friction was sufficient, as if with that he knew he was still in the world.

all of them would be gone but be like remembered music or the amassed richness of a lived life.

Non ricordo in che libro fosse. Ma ora è in questo

Noi siamo la nostra storia, la raccontiamo per rimanere vivi o mantenere in vita quelli che raccontiamo

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.

The truth is, like all places in the past, it cannot be found any longer.

Still, children seem like empty vessels who pick up on everything and are so affected by their surroundings. I mean, that's what they tell me in therapy and it seems to be true. Stuff I don't consciously remember affects my behavior every day. I see that now

Si he de conceder crédito a lo dicho por la gente que trajo la noticia debo creer, sin vacilar un punto, que murió con mi nombre en las pupilas

No. This is stuff that is from the first half of the alphabet. But I'm not completely consistent. Sometimes I go by the first name and sometimes by the second, then forget which I've done.

Memory is a lie, a creative act, a flimsy shield against the truth.

How was it that time only flowed in one direction, implacable and impersonal, dragging everyone with it, and couldn't be stopped and turned back to that one moment?

In her scorching memoir, Keeper, about the two years she lived with her mother-in-law and her rapidly worsening Alzheimer's disease, Andrea Gillies asks, 'What it is that dementia takes away?' And she answers herself: 'Everything; every last thing we reassure ourselves that nothing could take away from us.

Contents Beginnings 1. Facing Up 2. Getting Older 3. The Brain, the Mind and the Self 4. Memory and Forgetting 5. The Diagnosis 6. Shame 7. The Carers 8. Connecting through the Arts 9. Home 10. The Later Stages 11. Hospitals 12. At the End 13. Saying Goodbye 14. Death

Dementia is a particularly long farewell to the self. With most illnesses, death comes quite swiftly. With dementia, the flicker with which life ends is excruciatingly slowed.

It's like she's the living dead,' says Pauline. 'A long time ago, I lost her. I talk, and there's no reaction. Sometimes, when she laughs, or something in the tone of her voice - then I recognise the way we were twenty years ago. You fill in the gaps and the memories. Then she leaves again. You say goodbye all the time.

psychologist David Premack refers to as the "Russian-novel problem"—that is, when looking at the history of two animals (or humans), it is often hard to know what caused what, since the two may have interacted in so many ways over such a long time, and they may also remember events differently and act according to this subjective experience.

16 August 1804 was going to be a day they would remember for the rest of their lives.