Quotes About Memory

Threats of hell are unfortunately more memorable to people than promises of heaven.

People actually seemed to enjoy recalling that on a Saturday afternoon forty years ago Empire Avenue was bustling with people and cars and commerce, whereas now, of course, you could strafe it with automatic weapons and not harm a soul.

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

Like many fathers, Lincoln's now had two permanent residences—one in Dunbar, Arizona, the other in his only son's head.

After all, diminishment seemed to be the order of the day. Wouldn't you think the spirit, unshackled at last from so many of the body's youthful imperatives and bolstered by the wisdom of experience, would finally become ascendant? Wasn't memory, that bully and oppressor, supposed to become soft and spongy?

Was this what we wanted from our oldest friends? Reassurance that the world we remember so fondly still exists? That it hasn't been replaced by a reality we're less fully committed to?

Vera had often awakened feeling frisky, an enthusiasm that had seldom survived breakfast. Sully attributed this to her Puritan upbringing. Some girls you just had to catch before they woke up enough to remember who they were.

Some phrases were truly magical in their ability to dredge up the past from the bottom of life's lake, and for Sully, like all errant fathers, "Don't tell your mother" was such a phrase. He hadn't used it in about thirty years. But the words were right there, anxious to be spoken again after so long, a holy incantation. It was the phrase he'd been born to speak

everybody romanticized old people, seeing in them their own lost parents and grandparents, most of whom had bequeathed to their children the usual legacy of guilt, along with the gift of selective recollection.

The loss of a place isn't really so different from the loss of a person. Both disappear without permission, leaving the self diminished, in need of testimony and evidence. This happened. I was there.

Sully grinned down at her. "We wear the chains we forge in life, old girl." Miss Beryl blinked. "Who'd have thunk it? A literary allusion from the lips of Donald Sullivan. I don't suppose you remember who said that." "You did," Sully reminded her. "All through eighth grade.

Maybe the bad things didn't mean anything, as my father said, but in my head they kept trying to.

Hattie was an institution in Bath, and besides, everybody romanticized old people, seeing in them their own lost parents and grandparents, most of whom had bequeathed to their children the usual legacy of guilt, along with the gift of selective recollection. Most fathers and mothers did their children the great favor of dying before they began fouling themselves, before their children learned to equate them with urine-soaked undergarments and other grim realities of age and infirmity.

Hello, darling. Sorry about that. Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud. Especially that, but I should have known. You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.

You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.

It was strange, in a way, that now it was only the people he remembered. At the time he had never thought about people at all, but only of issues, of theories and dogmas and the masses, and now that it was all over and half his brain had been lost in the fight he never thought of the issues at all. Charles

What was this sense of guilt so seemingly innate, so easy to come by, to think, to feel, so verily physical? It seemed that when one felt this guilt one was but retracing in one's living a faint pattern designed long before; it seemed that one was trying to remember a gigantic shock that had left an impression upon one's body which one could not forget, but which had been almost forgotten by the conscious mind, creating in one a state of external anxiety.

We owe uniqueness to our dead at the very least

When loved ones depart forever, all that remains is the light from their eyes trapped in their jewelry. Beyond memory, it is the only souvenir we ever keep.

Is it odd to picnic at one's mother's grave? To sit up on the cliff and trickle pebbles over the ledge and listen to them bounce until they disappear? To eat an apple, to feel the sun, and to remember her, she who gave so much that it will never diminish? Is it odd to live with ehr in you, to continue to share your days and thoughts with the presence of her loving spirit?

Maybe it was more than this. Maybe the bond that forms between people doesn't get unmade so easily. Maybe it leaves its mark for a long time.

Sometimes, remembering a moment in your life can physically hurt as you relive everything that mattered to you then, and realize how far gone it is now.

She glared at me like she was about to punch me, but then she did something that surprised me even more. She kissed me. Be careful seaweed brain. She said putting on her invisible cap and disappearing. I probably would have sat there all day, trying to remember my name, but then the sea demons came.

Since Percy'd lost his memory,his whole life was one big fillin-the-blank. He was____________________, from____________________. He felt like ____________________, and if the monsters caught him, he'd be____________________.