Quotes About Memory

no treasure-house of Atreus was ever as rich as a well-stored memory.

She read it over and shivered. Not one word of their past-not one allusion to that mysterious interweaving of their lives which had enclosed them in the other like the flower in its sheath! What place had such memories in such a letter?

He started to walk across the Common, and on the first bench, under a tree, he saw her sitting. She had a gray silk sunshade over her head—how could he have ever imagined her with a pink one?

There had been days and nights when the memory of their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like fire; but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting fourth into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper nearness that a touch may sunder

The hotel, for all its sober state, was no longer fashionable. No one, in my memory, had ever known any one who went there; it was frequented by "politicians" and "Westerners," two classes of citizens whom my mother's intonation always seemed to deprive of their vote by ranking them with illiterates and criminals.

It was characteristic of her that she remembered her failures as keenly as her triumphs, and that the passionate desire to obliterate, to get even with them, was always among the latent incentives of her conduct.

It was almost as if this sense of relaxation were totally new to her, so far back did her memory have to travel to recover a time when she had not waked to apprehension, and fallen asleep rehearsing fresh precautions for the morrow.

La añoranza lo acompañaba día y noche como un incesante e indefinible deseo, como el súbito antojo de un enfermo por comer o beber algo que alguna vez probó y había olvidado por mucho tiempo

Every step she took seemed in fact to carry her farther from the region where, once or twice, he and she had met for an illumined moment and the recognition of this fact, when its first pang had been surmounted, produced in him a sense of negative relief.

Perhaps she too had kept her memory of him as something apart; but if she had, it must have been like a relic in a small dim chapel, where there was not time to pray every day...

a mortal thing so to immortalize

At my age (seventy-eight), I realize that everyone, or almost everyone except Hitler, will be forgotten from this period; if a writer can shore up an eroding coastline for a decade or two, that's the only "immortality" we'll ever know on this dying planet.

I've lost over twenty friends [to AIDS]. I've seen a world vanish-a culture that has been oppressed in one generation, liberated in the nest, and wiped out in the next.

He sat looking down at his hands--his fine strong unscarred hands. Suddenly and unreasonably he thought of another pair of hands--his mother's--with the knuckles enlarged, the skin broken--expressive--her life written on them. Scars. She had them.

Yes, the living, the mangled, the scarified, with the crazed responsibility of remembering everything, everything.

she sees her life pass before her in rapid succession, like clouds, different shapes and different colors, merging, passing into one another, the story of her life being pulled out of her, like the pages pulled from a book.

Gabriel, the man she might have tied the knot with except that it was not meant to be. Putting memories to sleep, like putting an animal down.

one thing she does not want to come home to is the after-smell of milk gone sour, a lingering smell that disgusts her and reminds her of sensations she daren't recall.

There was a cry that must have been mine

THE TWO OTHER GIRLS in the room, Mabel and Deirdre, said I imagined it. But they were wrong. My brother appeared to me there. A beam of light from the streetlamp lay in a crooked zigzag along the floor, toward the bed, and my brother stepped onto it, his face pensive but not crying, dressed as he might be for a wedding, his good suit, his collar and tie, and not a mark on him, no bloodstain

My mother is dead, my mother is dead," she kept saying it in her numbed state, because it had not sunk in. It is outside of her, it is a figment, both because it is so sudden and because she cannot pinpoint the exact moment, it being such and such a time in one land and a different time on the clock of the other. It had happened in lost time. The three previous days are jumbled

Family memory flows more completely through women. It is the women who learn much of the lore and who convey it to the young. Men forget the past in all its fleshiness and select which parts best fit into their lives.

A person is not really gone until everyone who knew them is gone.

Not remember? You've got to be kidding. Erik's flying banana-peel back-flop in the mud is the one thing about this game that everybody is going to remember.