Quotes About Memory

It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.

She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be .

I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn't see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.

Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.

We were trying to make our lives easier, trying, with all our rules, to make life effortless. But a friction began to arise between Nothing and Something, in the morning the Nothing vase cast a Something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that, at night the Nothing light spilled from the guest room spilled under the Nothing door and stained the Something hallway, there's nothing to say.

I try not to remember the life that I didn't want to lose but lost and have to remember

I said, 'I need to know how he died.' He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?' So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.

And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.

How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.

And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?

Oskar Schell: If the sun were to explode, you wouldn't even know about it for 8 minutes because thats how long it takes for light to travel to us. For eight minutes the world would still be bright and it would still feel warm. It was a year since my dad died and I could feel my eight minutes with him... were running out.

In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that?

How did her life live itself without her.

What does it remember like?

I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.

Mom said, His spirit is there, and that made me really angry. I told her, Dad didn't have a spirit! He had cells! His memory is there. His memory is here, I said, pointing at my head. Dad had a spirit, she said, like she was rewinding a bit in our conversation. I told her, He had cells, and now they're on rooftops, and in the river, and in the lungs of millions of people around New York, who breathe him every time they speak!

I observe, I write, I try not to remember the life that I didn't want to loose but lost and have to remember, being here fills my heart with so much joy, even if the joy isn't mine, and at the end of the day I fill the suitcase with old news.

I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.

he enclosed pieces of string that he used to measure out his body--his head, thigh, forearm, finger, neck, everything. He wanted me to sleep with them under my pillow. He said that when he came back, we would remeasure his body against the string as proof that he hadn't changed.

I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.

It's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.

It was inevitable: Yankel fell in love with his never-wife. He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depressed the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too-real chest, making his widower's rememberences that much more convincing and his pain that much more real.