Quotes About Memory

Looking back is easy for a while and then looking back gets murky.

You were very beautiful.

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed. Crossed out.

I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time. a stone in the hand means somebody's angry, the stone inside you still hasn't hit bottom.

You said Will you love me even more when I'm dead?

The present is a bully, always making us think the molten moment we inhabit is the most alarming ever, while the past tends to slip into that specious category of "simpler times.

Lighter laptops followed (our first one had a 10mb hard disk; today one of our laptops, at about one-third of the weight, has flash storage of 1 terabyte—100,000 times larger in thirty years).

Because every time she looked at me, she saw him, our son, that generous boy, and it was another gut punch bending her over, another parting of her flesh, and I was one of the thousand, and my gift to her now was my echo. (from "Twenty Reasons to Stay and One to Leave")

Scents, dreams, thoughts — even words — they all try to stick around, but we ignore them, so they leave.

She only nodded. "It's all we are in the end. Our stories.

I saw kids die of tuberculosis, influenza, pneumonia and broken hearts at St. Jerome's.

We become eternal by being held in memory's loving arms.

All that we are is story...It is what we arrive with. It is all we leave behind.

Curiosity is as much the parent of attention, as attention is of memory.

History is the enemy of memory.

I dreamt the past was never past redeeming:But whether this was false or honest dreamingI beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead.

The soul shrinksFrom all that it is about to remember,From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,And cries,"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steamAnd clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

That was when the childhood memory began to prey on his mind, for it suddenly struck him—and the force of it sent his thumbnail biting deep into the secret matchbook—that letting things happen and taking them gracefully had been, in a way, the pattern of his life. There was certainly no denying that the role of good loser had always held an inordinate appeal for him.

It took Emily a long time to realize that Sarah was dead. Sometimes, waking from a dream of childhood filled with Sarah's face and Sarah's voice, she would go and study her own face in the bright bathroom mirror until she found assurance that it was still the face of Sarah's sister, and that it didn't look old.

No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.

what's your name?" what?" i asked, squinting at the light. your name." I reconized Dr. Olendzki peering over me. you know my name." I want you to tell me." Rose. Rose Hathaway." Do you know your birthday?" Of course I do. Why are you asking me such stupid things? Did you lose my records?" Dr. Olendzki gave an exasperated sigh and walked off, taking the annoying light with her. "I think she's fine,

You're burned into my mind forever. There is nothing, nothing in this world that will ever change that." And it was memories like that that made it so hard to comprehend this quest to kill him, even if he was a Strigoi. Yet...at the same time I had to destroy him. I needed to remember him as the man who'd loved me and held me in bed. I needed to remember that that man would not want to stay a monster.

Is Hopper celebrating with you?" "Hopper? Why would—" My mouth snapped shut for a few moments. "Oh. I, uh, kind of forgot about him.

We studied our angels for a few moments more, looking at where we had lain side by side in that sweet, quiet moment. I wished what I'd said was true, that we had truly left our mark on the mountain. But I knew that after the next snowfall, our angels would disappear into the whiteness and be nothing more than a memory.