Quotes About Memory

I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.

I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.

These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.

In bottom-up approaches [to processing trauma], the body's sensation and movement are the entry points and changes in sensorimotor experience are used to support self-regulation, memory processing, and success in daily life. Meaning and understanding emerge from new experiences rather than the other way around. Through bottom-up interventions, a shift in the somatic sense of self in turn affects the linguistic sense of self.

What this tells me is that facts are only the smallest components of memory.

about one's life; memories are unreliable—they smudge, and fade, like disappearing footprints in the sand. We're too busy standing in the middle of it all to remember everything perfectly

We are hardwired to remember negative events over positive ones, so we ruminate on our mistakes and the slights of others. Our ability to use language means that we can spend hours mentally criticizing what we did in the past or worrying about what we'll do in the future. No wonder we love dogs, who don't need meditation retreats to get over the shame of getting into the garbage last Thursday.

My mother who died young In an outlandish rhythm Would have been seventy now And perhaps dead in funeral time. So I may start to mourn As I would celebrate The first or second birthday Of a still-born baby. - Out of Season

I think I'll just go take a shower," I said. It wasn't until Samuel stiffened that I remembered I'd just come out of the shower. So much for playing normal.

Silence fell, and I remembered that I was supposed to be running this. It reminded me in an odd way of the time I'd had to take over my sister's Girl Scout troop when my mother had been sick. Fourteen preteen girls, a tableful of werewolves—there were certain monstrous similarities.

I'll remember your words," he told her with returned seriousness, though he pictured Anna taking her grandmother's rolling pin after the ghosts who haunted him, and it made him want to...smirk again.

The hardest memory of slavery that Rialla had to bear was not the lack of freedom; it was the lack of desiring freedom.

Poor boy, he'd been dead more than three years.

When was the first time you saw Frost?" "When he tried that coup on Marsilia," I said. "Um. Two years ago? Okay, right. That means it can't have been Frost.

Wait," I said. "Leo. Leo. Chicago." Then it came to me. "Leo James? Looks as though he ought to be a Nordic skiing champion? Tall, long, and blond.

Humility is as good for the soul as it is for the memory

I had to ask. "Do you really think everything I write down is about you?" Thomas said, "Well, this next bit had better be. I insist." It is very bad for Thomas's character when he gets his own way all the time. That's why I'm going to omit the next bit. If he has forgotten it in fifty years or so, too bad for him. I won't have.

The old woman sang of a time gone ahead, and of those already walking ahead of her on the pathway. Her eyes were reddened as though they bled. And her songs, like the pathways, were interweavings of times and places and of all that breathed between earth and sky.

We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us ... we are doing the work of memory.

Strange to think of a form of love going extinct, like a carrier pigeon, a rare tortoise, a lilac or apple whose seeds are not to be found anymore, the scent and taste of the thing long lost, never to be touched again.

This nostalgia, like much nostalgia, was not for something actually experienced and lost, but for a notion held in the fond focus of the imagination.

I want to be remembered in my overalls," said Aunt Lou. "You will," said Grandfather. "Believe me, you will." Mama and William laughed. "That's how we think of you," said William. "You see me every day," Aunt Lou said to William. "You don't have to remember me.

I had to come," said Dr. Sam. "To have a look at the aunts." Grandfather laughed. "Well, this is Harriet, and Mattie, and Lou," said Caleb, touching each one on the shoulder. "How do you do? Didn't you have sheep by those names?" Dr. Sam asked Mama. Mama smiled. "Yes, I saw Mattie the sheep just yesterday," said Aunt Lou. "She's a bit fat.

I sing the songs I sang to you every night. I sing them so I will remember you, hoping that you will remember me too, even though I am here, and you are there.