Quotes About Memory

I thought of my mother late that night, after leaving Dorothy, as I followed the moon's path back home across the Moose River. My mother, maybe she was in that moon's light. I didn't know any more, but when I was younger, Iuse to imagine that she was. I'd talk to the moon some nights, and I knew my mother listened. I haven't done that in a long time, me. -Through Black Spruce, Joseph Boyden, ch 13, pg 119

Everything can change in Petersburg except its weather. And its light. It's the northern light, pale and diffused, one in which both memory and eye operate with unusual sharpness. In this light, and thanks to the directness and length of the streets, a walker's thoughts travel farther than his destination...

A glance leaves an imprint on anything it's dwelt on.

More than anything, memory resembles a library in alphabetical disorder, and with no collected works by anyone.

the present engenders the past far more energetically than the other way around.

Dotknij mnie - pod palcami poczujesz rzep uschÅ'y, wilgo? wieczoru lub poranku, tÄ™tno kamienioÅ'omu miasta, oddech stepowej pustki, tych, którzy ju? nie ?yjÄ…, lecz których pamiÄ™tam. Dotknij mnie - a poczujesz pod czubkami palców wszystko to, co istnieje poza mnÄ…, beze mnie, co nie wierzy mnie, mojej twarzy, memu paltu, wpisujÄ…c nas w swój bilans zawsze po stronie ujemnej.

There are places in which things don't change. These are a substitute for one's memory.

Liberdade é quando você esquece o nome do tirano.

Why did we make up nicknames? Maybe they were easier to remember. Maybe, too, they just made frightening things more familiar, even a little funny in the midst of the seriousness of war.

Time explodes, so again, eternity is not something everlasting. You can have it right here, now, in your experience of your earthly relationships. I've lost a lot of friends,...that moment when I was with them has an everlasting quality about it that is now still with me. What it gave me then is still with me, and there's a kind of intimation of immortality in that.

It is remarkable how completely forgotten episodes, when touched with a word, open to the memory—at first vaguely, like the recollection of a dream, but then with increasing clarity and certitude, until at last all is again present, and one wonders how such scenes could have ever been forgotten.

and though it is perhaps too facile to say that he was already in love with her, it is certainly true that from that moment on she was a permanent element in his mind.

I suppose that everyone of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next.

I do remember,' explained Christopher Robin, 'only Pooh doesn't very well, so that's why he likes having it told to him again. Because then it's a real story and not just a remembering.

Dad used to read aloud to us from Dickens and Kipling. My tastes were omnivorous. I read anything I could lay my hands on, but the memory that stays with me is that of my father reading the Jungle Books to us when we were young. Beautiful stories!

If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act…. The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach.

Oh, when I was in love with you,Then I was clean and brave,And miles around the wonder grewHow well I did behave.And now the fancy passes by,And nothing will remain,And miles around they'll say that IAm quite myself again.

Ah, I think that nothing in the world vanishes utterly—nothing—not only what is said, but what is thought. All our deeds and words and thoughts are little streams, trickling springs underground.

She wore a pleated skirt, a white cotton blouse, and simple black shoes with knee high stockings. At the arc of each step, the skirt would rise to expose a few inches of her taut thighs. Neither Earl nor Duke could recall what Chad was wearing.

The end of a summer day; Sweet love dead.

The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.

Cannibalism is a Western, white imposition. A retrospective racism. Tribal memory, collective dreams and wishful thinking should, if not silence, then at least reduce to a tearful academic whisper any attempt to discredit the lives of Indians. Haven't they suffered enough?

I did know once, only I've sort of forgotten.