Quotes About Memory

Regie Gibson said, "Our problem as Americans is we actually hate history. . . . What we love is nostalgia. We love to remember things exactly the way they didn't happen. History itself is often an indictment. And people? We hate to be indicted.

It had replayed in her mind, over and over, growing in importance till it seemed her whole life could be slotted into two categories. Life before the kiss, and life after the kiss. Her life before the kiss had moved step by step ever closer to the predestined event. Meeting Dougal. And kissing him.

If you dream, think of me.

But why did he remember only the things in life that had hurt him? Why couldn't he remember the things that had given him joy or caused him to smile: the jokes he had heard, the songs that had made him lift his arms in the air, the people who had loved him, whose cheeks he had touched with his fingers?

If I could, I would work my way backward, paring away the years. I would reel my life arouond the wheel of this longing like so much loose wire.

The living carry us inside them like pearls. We survive only as long as they remember us.

Sometimes, driving past restaurants that had once been other restaurants, big box stores that had once been wood lots and houses, I imagined that if I could just make the right set of turns, the city would unlock for me, and my car would carry me into the roads of fifteen years ago.

Tell me what you see vanishing and I Will tell you who you are —W. S. Merwin, "For Now

The central thing that Winslow could remember from this tme was the feeling of satisfaction he had, all the ride down with Carole King for company. As far as he could take it. As far as he could go. Something at least would happen next and this part would be over. He could feel the same movement starting up inside him, the same gathering wave, and wondered where it would leave him this time. Nothing to do, though. Nothing to do but wait and see.

Because of the workings of karmic memory, the same fear and doubt had to return and yet her response to that experience had to be very different in order to overcome it. In

So you can remember everything about your life from the last seven years, but nothing before that? Not now, Carl. There must be something, Carl said, undeterred. I remember fighting the Romans at Masada, he said seriously. He didn't have to see Carl's face to recognise the shock that was there. That was seventy-three A.D ... ? Van Helsing shrugged. You asked.

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.

In the coming days and weeks, Laila would scramble frantically to commit it all to memory, what happened next. Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could--a look, a whisper, a moan--to salvage from perishing to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all.

I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.

She would grab whatever she could - a look, a whisper, a moan - to salvage from perishing, to preserve. But time is most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all .

That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.

But even when he wasn't around, he was.

Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could - a look, a whisper, a moan- to salvage from perishing, to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all.

I was the lucky one because I was protected by my youth. Je pouvais oublier. I still had the luxury of forgetting. He did not.

Mammy's heart was like a pallid beach where Laila's footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed

They had overshadowed her in life. They would obliterate her in death.

Entering my childhood home is a little disorienting, like reading the end of a novel that I'd started, then abandoned, long ago.

I looked westward and marveled that, somewhere over those mountains, Kabul still existed. It really existed, not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle.