Quotes About Memory

O passado é aquilo que transportamos connosco

But when you split someone's head open it smelled like an abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already in another life.

Life was for absorbing, not recording. And in the end, it was all just paper that someone would have to dispose of after you were gone. Perhaps, after all, one's purpose in this world was to be forgotten, not remembered

Ursula missed the sound of church bells. There were so many simple things she had taken for granted before the war. She wished that she could go back and appreciate them properly.

Home was an idea, and like Arcadia it was lost in the past. She

Her past already seemed an antiquated curiosity—a virtual space re-created by the museum of the future.

Notes of the 'Remember to' variety that the owner must have written to herself. Miss Matilda

Life was for absorbing, not recording. And in the end, it was all just paper that someone would have to dispose of after you were gone.

The toll of the dead had been her business during the war, the endless stream of figures that represented the blitzed and the bombed passed across her desk to be collated and recorded. They had seemed overwhelming, but the greater figures—the six million dead, the fifty million dead, the numberless infinities of souls—were in a realm beyond comprehension.

Their names written on water. Or scorched into the earth. Or atomized into the air. Legion.

Juliet could still remember when Hitler had seemed like a harmless clown. No one was amused now. ("The clowns are the dangerous ones," Perry said.)

We must remember these people when we are safely in the future.

When Theo returned along St. Andrews Street the girl with the custard-yellow hair was no longer there and he worried that she might never be there again. Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn't even a shape left in the world where you'd been, neither the trace of a smile nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing

Home... wasn't Egerton Gardens, wasn't even Fox Corner. Home was an idea, and like Arcadia it was lost in the past.

A whole life could be contained in a dinner-service pattern

I know many writers who say that the memory of reading fairy tales is their first, and sometimes only, memory of rapture. I hope that this unpredictable, intense collection inspires you to read fairy tales-and then to read them again.

Experience can't be reduced to a 4x6 inch still, her mother says. People stick their loves in cellophane prisons. They incarcerate images. Then they put these cemeteries on coffee tables. They're mockeries.

The moment had passed. But it had happened.

There are some people who leave impressions not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water.

I hope you won't completely forget me.

She had tried to forget him, realizing the inutility of remembering. But the thought of him was like an obsession, ever pressing itself upon her. It was not that she dwelt upon details of their acquaintance, or recalled in any special or peculiar way his personality; it was his being, his existence, which dominated her thought, fading sometimes as if it would melt into the mist of the forgotten, reviving again with an intensity which filled her with an incomprehensible longing.

She perceived that her will had blazed up, stubborn and resistant. She could not at that moment have done other than denied and resisted. She wondered if her husband had ever spoken to her like that before. and if she had submitted to his command. Of course she had; she remembered that she had. But she could not realise why or how she should have yielded, feeling as she then did.

Everything that has ever happened to me is still all with me.

Thinking about her was the same as the hole you keep on feeling with your tongue after you lose a tooth. Time after time, my mind kept going to that empty spot, the spot where I felt like she should be.