Quotes About Memory

He liked the thought that his own power would one day be refined into translucence, with no memory of the blood and earth that had generated it.

I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

Maintaining an appearance mattered as much—more—than what was underneath. The deeper things could come and go, but what broke the surface would be lodged in everyone's memory.

If he couldn't search or retrieve or view his own past, then it wasn't really his. It was lost.

The old pictures were no help; like all good pictures, they hid the truth.

I was not a nostalgic person. I didn't save Christmas cards, rarely took pictures, felt mostly indifferent to the snapshots people sent me. Until the accident, I had always thought my memory was bad, but in fact I'd thrown the past away, a ream of discarded events--so that I could move, unencumbered, into the future.

But her only real witness, then and now, was Lydia. And her sister could only listen. She could not advise, or answer the questions that troubled Anna most: When would she be allowed to know what she knew? Or when would she have forgotten it?

She was careful not to indulge this line of thinking. "I don't remember him," she told Coz. "I have nothing to say." She did this for Coz's protection and her own—they were writing a story of redemption, of fresh beginnings and second chances. But in that direction lay only sorrow.

It's all still there: the pool with its blue and yellow tiles from Portugal, water laughing softly down a black stone wall. The house is the same, except quiet. The quiet makes no sense. Nerve gas? Overdoses? Mass arrests? I wonder as we follow a maid through a curve of carpeted rooms, the pool blinking at us past every window. What else could have stopped the unstoppable parties? But it's nothing like that. Twenty years have passed.

By now it was afternoon. Ted began to walk, still dazed, until he found himself among a skein of backstreets so narrow they felt dark. He passed churches blistered with grime, moldering palazzi whose squalid interiors leaked sounds of wailing cats and children. Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time." (p. 212)

He replayed the moment--an old disquieting conundrum that clouded whatever new thought had been trying to form. Abruptly, he was exhausted, as if he'd been walking for days--as if he'd wandered too far from his own life to reenter it.

You will feel a surge as the data floods your body. The surge may contain memory, heat, cold, longing, pain, or even joy. Although the data are alien, the memories dislodged will be your own…

I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.

Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us.

That was the last time I saw Carol. I didn't want to be told I had to be a woman. What I wanted from her was the mystery to a solution.

But there were times when I remembered my younger self the way you'd remember a dear friend you'd lost, for reasons you no longer quite understood.

a memoir is meant to be an impression of life, and not a photograph.

Lincoln would remember this episode with amusement.20

Driving east into the bright sun, he'd been dogged by a creeping sense of déjà vu, but it wasn't until Kath called to Aidan—Help Father with the cooler!—that he recognized the scene from his own childhood. How strange, how disorienting, to find himself in the man's seat, driving, when in his mind he was still the little boy.

The events of his childhood had never left him. Instead the memory had grown watery, indistinct, like something he'd dreamed. Abused, molested: these were not terms he used, even to himself.

It's hard to know, ever, where a story beings. We touch down in a world fully inhabited by others, a drama already in progress. By the time we make our entrance - incontinent and screaming, like dirty bombs detonating - the climax is a distant memory. Our arrival is not the beginning; it is a consequence.

That the woman was beautiful and dear to him, that he'd told her things he'd never told a living soul: this would have been more than enough even without the dreamlike echo of another moment, equally potent. For it seemed to him, the whole day long, that both reels were rolling at once, his boyhood and manhood, the indelible past and achingly tangible present. The boy he'd been and the man he was;

The story of my family. . .changes with the teller.