Quotes About Memory

Did you see her again in France?" I asked him." "No. When I got to France, she was already dead. She committed suicide ..." "Why?" "She often told me she was frightened of getting old...

Lots of people perish on the highways. All those faces should be preserved, engagements kept, promises upheld. Impossible. I walked out instantly. Fleeing the scene of a crime. That kind of game can destroy you. Anyway, I've never known who I was. I authorize my biographer to simply call me "a man," and I wish him luck. I've been unable to lengthen my stride, my breath, or my sentences. He won't understand the first thing about this story. Neither do I. We're even.

Il faut longtemps pour que resurgisse à la lumière ce qui a été effacé. Des traces subsistent dans des registres et l'on ignore où ils sont cachés et quels gardiens veillent sur eux et si ces gardiens consentiront à vous les montrer. Ou peut-être ont-ils oublié tout simplement que ces registres existaient

Why do people whose existence you are unaware of, whom you meet once and will never see again, come to play, behind the scenes, an important role in your life?

We discover, often too late to talk to him about it, an episode from his life that a loved one has concealed from you. Has he really hidden it from you? He has forgotten, or more likely, over time, he no longer thinks about it. Or, quite simply, he can't find the words.

Someone had told him one day that you forget the voices of those whom you have been close to in the past very quickly.

He was seeking a lost innocence and settings made for enjoyment and ease, but where one could never be happy again.

Il essayait vainement de se rappeler dans quel livre était écrit que chaque première rencontre est une blessure.

Do you often wear this dress?" He pointed to the black satin dress with the two yellow swallows. "I found it here when I rented the room. It must have belonged to the previous lodger." "Or perhaps to you, in an earlier life."

People don't come back any more. Haven't you noticed that, Monsieur?

And then the next fifteen years fell apart: a few blurry faces, a few vague memories, ashes...

H?n anh t?ng hi v?ng già ?i cùng cô ?y?

And yet, from time to time, beneath this thick layer of amnesia, you can certainly sense something, an echo, distant, muted, but of what, precisely, it is impossible to say. Like finding yourself on the edge of a magnetic field, with no pendulum to pick up the radiation.

Time had wiped the slate clean.

The other day, I happened to walk through it. I had a strange sensation. Not that time had passed, but that another me, a twin, was prowling around there -- down to the smallest detail, and until the end of time -- through what I had experienced over a very short period.

There are blanks in a life, but also sometimes what they call a refrain. For periods of varying length, you don't hear this refrain, as if you've forgotten it.

One has to be aware of so-called witnesses.

Dicen que los lugares conservan por lo menos cierta huella de las personas que los han habitado.

Nada le perturbaba el sueño. Todavía no tenía memoria.

But these memories drifted away like bubbles of soap or fragments of a dream that vanished on waking.

No hay mejor sistema para que se desvanezcan los fantasmas que mirarles a los ojos.

Without fully realizing it, I began writing my first book. It was neither a vocation nor a particular gift that pushed me to write, but quite simply the enigma posed by a man I had no chance of finding again, and by all those questions that would never have an answer.

How much longer would we go on being old young people? They waved goodbye to me. I was moved by Annette. She and I were exactly the same age, and she'd become one of those slightly faded Danish beauties who used to attract me when I was twenty. They were older than I was at that time, and I was grateful for their tender protection.

He no longer knew which man he was. He told me that after a certain number of years, we accept a truth that we've intuited but kept hidden from ourselves, out of carelessness or cowardice: a brother, a double died in our stead on an unknown date and in an unknown place, and his shadow ends up merging with us.