Quotes About Memory

In other words, rendering loss was a way of honoring life.

Sitting with Ronan on the couch I often thought 'How can I make this moment more precious? and then I'd realize with a sense of panic that no additional meaning needed to be sought or found. This was all there was. 'But still', I would think, 'What if I can't remember the way his hands feel, his hair. What if I forget how he smells? The sound of his laugh? The shape of his two front teeth?' Time was both too contracted and forever seeming.

I felt as though i were being shown a photo of someone well loved, and long dead. I didn't want to be reminded of what I no longer seemed to have.

The origin of my body and my mind didn't matter. I, the part of me that learned, that called on my memories, that knew I'd pulled a plant like this before, that had moved this hand to do it, was fifteen years old and innocent of evil or good. Neutral. From here forward, I was blank tape; what would be recorded there, and when, and why, was up to me.

I don't trust memory, anyway. Why should I? Memories, however undependable, ought to be the stuff on the sand when the tides of experience recedes. As long as they're part of that process, there's something valid about them, something that ties them to real life.

It was the word 'late' that did it. Such a stupid word to use of the dead, implying that they would be with us today if they hadn't happened to be delayed in traffic somewhere...

Any subject we exclude from fiction will drop from our culture's memory.

I have tried to use memory and invention together, like two hands engaged in the same muddy work of digging up the past.

When I was four I was watching ants walking up Stove and she ran and splatted them all so they wouldn't eat our food. One minute they were alive and the next minute they were dirt. I cried so my eyes nearly melted off.

Pretending to misremember a name was such a reliable way to annoy.

He supposed it was always that way with the dead, they slid away before we knew enough to ask them the right questions.

And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarified nothing.

Ma knows everything except the things she doesn't remember right, or sometimes she says I'm too young for her to explain a thing.

it was always that way with the dead; they slid away before we knew enough to ask them the right questions. All we could do was remember them, as much as we could remember them, whether it was accurate or not.

So they're fake? No, no. Stories are a different kind of true. I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened. Then we go out the door.

Over a lifetime you packed your brain tight with data, like an overstuffed suitcase, only for it all to fall out in the end.

I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened

I didn't forget a day of you either.

He was a super shiny boy and I liked the shape of him. Under the blanket. In the shower. I liked his shadow on the street and his imprint on the sofa. I hated the smell of hair gel on his head, but I loved it on the pillow. I love the smell of losing someone.

The trouble with death is that there is no next. There is only what was and for that I am profoundly and heartbrokenly grateful.

Remembering is mental time travel.

I put it in my hat to remember to post it,' she explained, 'but I forgot, so it came with me today still in my hat.

me by my real name.' 'Oh dear – I shall never remember that

is not Watzisname,' said Watzisname, patiently. 'I have told