Quotes About Memory

At times in its history, Christianity has been an instrument of repression. In our living memory, however, it has also been deployed as a means of liberation and progress.

As a rule, politicians tend to remember the things they wish to emulate or the things they hope to avoid.

history is a living thing that never dies.

Fading photographs on the corridor walls from the 1960s and 1970s showed children strapped to frightening-looking machines, wires dangling from their heads. They smiled at the camera in uncomprehending excitement as if they were at the beach.

She became my favorite scar.

There's a fine line between forgetting an event, and suppressing the memory of it.

it's their own unplanned words, their own thoughtless gestures and inflections, which have clung to my memory like flies caught on flypaper.

cuando Gill salió del coche aquella mañana tan fría, consciente de su ausencia definitiva, la invadió la mayor sensación de soledad que recordaba haber tenido nunca.

Our culture is an edifice built of external memories, a way of fending off mortality.

Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper... The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies.

The man who 'forgets' his toothbrush in a woman's house is a man who wants to come back.

There seemed to be almost nothing left of Lalitha; she was breaking up on him the way dead songbirds did in the wild-they were impossibly light to begin with, and as soon as their little hearts stopped beating they were barely more than bits of fluff and hollow bone, easily scatterd in the wind-but this only made him more determined to hold onto what little of her he still had.

Your little body had once been deeper inside your mother than your father's dick had ever gone, you'd squeezed your entire goddamned head through her pussy, and then for the longest time you'd sucked on her tits whenever you felt like it, and you couldn't for the life of you remember it. You found yourself self-alienated from the get-go.

No one stays haunted by a person they're not still in love with.

Time and again Gary had the feeling that there was something disagreeable that his family wanted to forget, something only he insisted on remembering; something requiring only his nod, his go-ahead, to be forgotten. This feeling, too, was a Warning Sign.

An accident of brain development stacked the deck against children: the mother had three or four years to fuck with your head before your hippocampus began recording lasting memories. You'd been talking to your mom since you were one year old and listening to her for even longer, but you couldn't remember a single word of what you or she had said before your hippocampus kicked into gear. Your

Love. This was the way not to fall into forgetting. Love, and a good publicist.

How do we picture the past? Does it become clearer as it drifts into the distance? Can it be seen from more angles, a better vantage, with finer instruments for optics, and more supporting documentation to draw from? Or has its essence already vanished, leaving space for lies to multiply and thrive, spreading across paperwork that is good for nothing except, perhaps, a nervous acting captain's next snack?

A childhood never fully dies. Stories of life come up through cracks in the accounts, the spaces between death sentences, the pauses in obituaries, finding light and air to grow.

If. If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan's pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, then summer wouldn't give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on Dean Street had lasted one day and that day was over, it was dark out, had been for hours. The Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock read nine-thirty in red-and-blue neon. Final score, a million to nothing. The million-dollar kid. Your school wasn't on fire, you were.

Memory is a rehearsal for a show that never goes on.

This kiss would be with me, invisible badge or scar, when I went back to the apartment.

Minutes died serially into hours. Bruno

The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.