Quotes About Memory

Memory is a wilful dog. It won't be summoned or dismissed but it cannot survive without you. It can sustain you or feed on you. It visits when it is hungry, not when you are. It has a schedule of its own that you can never know. It can capture you, corner you or it can liberate you. It can leave you howling and it can make you smile. Sometimes it's funny what you remember.

Everything seems so small here now, old, mashed-in, more rundown even than I remember it, but with a heartbreaking familiarity at each door that makes me wonder if I can take in anything new, so strongly do I feel in Brownsville that I am walking in my sleep.

Dear as remember'd kisses after death,And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'dOn lips that are for others; deep as love,Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

This is the truth the poet sings,That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.

The days will grow to weeks, the weeks to months,The months will add themselves and make the years,The years will roll into the centuries,And mine will ever be a name of scorn.

Do we indeed desire the deadShould still be near us at our side?

I am a part of all I have seen.

What we learn with pleasure we never forget.

The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.

What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.

Susan: ¡fue ayer!, ayer cuando conoció a un peruano en Londres y se casó con él en Lima, ahora se casaba en Londres con un peruano conocido en Lima. Pensar que Juan Lucas estaba en Londres cuando ella salía con Santiago…

What we know instinctively," she continued, "is simply what we are trying to remember. Knowledge is memory.

No place worth knowing yields itself at sight, and those the least inviting on first view may leave the most haunting pictures upon the walls of memory.

And the best and the worst of this is, That neither is most to blame, If you've forgotten my kisses, And I've forgotten your name.

And the best and the worst of this is That neither is most to blame, If you have forgotten my kisses And I have forgotten your name.

The whole point is, we can forget. It's important that we forget some things. Otherwise we'd go round the world carrying a hotload of stuff we just don't need.

Abba songs, as anyone who knows knows, are constructed, technically and harmonically, so as to physically imprint the human brain as if biting it with acid, to ensure we will never, ever, ever, be able to forget them.

In fact all he can remember of her is that he sent her a postcard he wished afterwards he'd kept for himself.

I wished that my own bones were unbound, I wished they were mingling, picked clean by fish, with the bones of another body, a body my bones and heart and soul had loved with unfathomable certainty for decades, and both of us down deep now, lost to everything but the fact of bare bones on a dark seabed.

It's all right to forget, you know, he said. It's good to. In fact, we have to forget things sometimes. Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we'd never sleep ever again.

What I do when it distresses me that there's something I can't remember, is. Are you listening? Yes, Elisabeth said through the crying. I imagine that whatever it is I've forgotten is folded close to me, like a sleeping bird. What kind of bird? Elisabeth said. A wild bird, Daniel said. Any kind. You'll know what kind when it happens. Then, what I do is, I just hold it there, without holding it to tight, and I let it sleep. And that's that.

No one remembering that old man. Except, I just did, there

In her dream, she slapped the past in its face.

it's the best fish I've ever caught, that fish I didn't catch, cause it's a fish that will always be with me now and never be eaten, it'll never die, that fish I'll never land.