Quotes About Memory

The moment historians examine the past they risk changing it, by selectively re-arranging events, consciously or not, according to the judgment(s) of posterity or their own baggage of values and prejudices.

He liked to say that what makes literature is "inventing truly from honestly acquired knowledge, so that what you make up is truer than what you might remember.

If the dead can come back to this earth and move unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the garish day and in the darkest night—amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours—always, always; and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath; or if the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.

When he said someone had 'died", Erd?s meant that that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had "left", the person had died.

The past doesn't change, does it?" "It's still there, same as it ever was. But we see it differently as we get older.

One thing that's certain about the future: it will have more history than the present.

It must be terrible to be old, when you love someone who died young. They never change in your mind, and every day you see yourself grow away from that person you were when you loved and knew them. Until you are more of a shadow than they are, and the girl you were is altogether gone, more dead even than that young man on the battlefield.

But we cannot choose what we remember and what we forget. All the lovely bright moments of our lives get forgotten except for remnants here and there, like the leaves blown from a tree in the autumn, and the terrible things, they stick with us forever, as bright and raw as the day they happened.

It must be terrible to be old, when you love someone who died young. They never change in your mind, and every day you see yourself grow away from that person you were when you loved and knew them. Until

Some people want the past repeated and have an interest in making sure we don't remember it.

then traced a fingertip across his forehead, around one eye, along the length of his nose. As if she wanted to later draw his likeness.

Shakespeare said only our bad deeds live after us," Victoria, the smart one, said. "The good is oft interred with their bones.

Mortui non mordent

I stored the information for later use. My mind is a warehouse of information like that, bushels of scrap paper filled with notes.

what I call the "first love syndrome," found not only in what we most like in online systems but in movies, television shows, and novels.The principle is that we most love what we first experience

Nothing recedes into the vanishing point of time's rear-view faster than the truth.

Close your eyes and I'll kiss you, Tomorrow I'll miss you.

Some of the agonies that burn in the heart forever begin as brief as snapshots.

exactly half the phenomenal world is gone

I don't come from the past, I come from now, here in the cauldron of plague. When the doors to the camps were finally beaten down, the Jews of Europe no longer came from Poland and Holland and France. They came from Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But I will never understand how the straights could have let us die like this - year after year after year, collaborating by indifference - except by sifting through the evidence of my queer journey.

a body on the sand. My journal gets very spotty here, with only a single detailed entry

Two ghosts, briefly rescued from oblivion; a small act of reclamation, a chance to make amends. -Paul Murray, SKIPPY DIES

The problem with getting older is you still remember how things used to be.

I believe that nothing that once was can be completely undone. Even if destroyed in the material world and forgotten by men, it remains and will remain alive in the memory of an infinite being for which the past as well as the future is always present, and that is thus the greatest, the only true historian, and the keeper of the eternal tradition of which even our best human traditions ...are but shadows and images.