Quotes About Memory

Myself, I thought about you the whole time. Even when I wasn't thinking about you, I thought about you.

Because when I think about what it was like to live with you, it was like all these things. It was like living in a poem or a picture, a story, a piece of music, when I think of it now. It was wonderful.

We have to hope that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters. It is the only responsibility memory has. But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They're foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quote regardless.

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 too tight, and I let it sleep. And that's that.

Animals, Mark, have no use for nostalgia, Aunt Kenna says. It is not a tool for survival, my darling. But

She knew it was supposed to happen like that, that although these photographs were a signal to the eyes about something really happening, the more she looked at them the less she felt or thought. The more pictures she saw, the less they meant something that had happened to real people and the more it became possible to pile real people up like that again anywhere you wanted and have your picture taken standing smiling behind them.

The twentieth century was wedded to the remembrance of things past, with Proust making the act of remembrance an art of sensory timeslip in the first texts which would become A la Recherche du Temps Perdu in 1913 and with Joyce making an epic forever out of a single passing ordinary day with the serialization of the first chapters of Ulysses not long after.

Do things just go away? her mother says. Do things that happened not exist, or stop existing, just because we can't see them happening in front of us? They do when they're over, George says. And what about the things we watch happening right in front of us and still can't really see? her mother says.

Is it possible, he said, to be in love not with someone but with their eyes. I mean, with how eyes that aren't yours let you see where you are, who you are…We have to hope that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters…It is the only responsibility memory has. But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They're foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quote regardless.

We have to hope that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters. It is the only responsibility memory has. But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They're foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless.

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.

You hold me very tight in under my clothes, and if there's a library anywhere near then someone just removed its roof, the shelves just flooded with the sun and all the old books just remembered what it means to be bound in skin and to have a spine.

All of this information flashes through George's head in that fraction of a second it takes to do the single swivel round towards H in her mother's chair and say the words: It's my mother's study. Cool, H says.

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.

can't bear it, he said. It is like your mother has become a dwarf and as if her dwarf self is always twinkling away in all the corners of the house and the yard, always in the corner of my eye. I shrugged.

Like entering what you think is going to be history and finding endless sad fragility.

Later that night, when she was home and falling asleep on the couch in front of the TV, Elisabeth would remember seeing his eyes open, and how it was like that moment when you just happen to see the streetlights come on and it feels like you're being given a gift, or a chance, or that you yourself've been singled out and chosen by the moment.

there's nothing left of them, the pantomime innocents or the man with the gun, but bones in grass, bones in flowers, the leafy branches of the ash tree above them. Which s what, in the end, is left of us all, whether we carry a gun while we're here or don't. So. While we're here. I mean, while we're still here.

A whole time can reduce down to a single taste, a moment. A whole person down to the skelf of a self

They should invent some way to tape-record your dreams. I've written songs in my dreams that were Beatles songs. Then I'd wake up and they'd be gone.

Everyone who'd lost something of crucial importance wished he or she could go back to the moment when it was still theirs. The wish was so powerful it seemed it might reverse the direction of time. It bore apparitions and ghosts.

She stared at it for a long time, seeing the rabbit in the moon, and thoughts of Watership Down, which she'd read as a child, drifted into her head.

Just because something is unspoken doesn't mean that it disappears.

The fact is, I have been dead so long and it has been simply such a grim shoving of the hours behind me…since the hideous summer of '78, when I went down to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me and I knew neither hope nor peace.