Quotes About Memory

My mom has a tape from when I was, like, 2 years old, talking with my grandma, telling her a story that's really elaborate about werewolves and wolves.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have seen you amused." "You exaggerate." "Nay, my memory is clear because on each occasion you came within a hair's breadth of getting us both killed.

I am always happy when my body remembers to feel things other than scared.

But that was New Orleans for you. The old didn't die here. They were just forgotten.

Forty-two: On your first mission into space, you recall your mother's umbilical cord being cut from you. Your high heels floating down the river, all the way into the Atlantic Ocean.

In the mirror I see only the time-lapsed weather patterns of 1964.

I draw a door on the floor and tell him, This is where dad used to take me for dinner.

Forgetfulness - a gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.

On any given day, acts of kindness occur all across the city. Someone gives up their bed so someone else can rest their tired, aching bones. Someone hands a bit of change to a stranger. There's hot soup and good fortune, soft words and bread. Then there are the cruel things that happen, the worst that you can imagine. Heaven help you if even one of them finds you. The memory of it will never let you alone.

By living exclusively for the present, we let ourselves be hemmed in by an ocean of death. Conversely, by reviving the past, we enlarge our living space.

Bir ÅŸehirden geriye, yar? sarhoÅŸ bir ÅŸairin onun üzerinde dolaÅŸan umursamaz bak??lar?ndan baÅŸka bir ÅŸey kalmaz.

Je n'ai pas connu le Levant de la grande époque, je suis venu trop tard, il ne restait plus du théâtre qu'un décor en lambeaux, il ne restait plus du festin que des miettes. Mais j'ai constamment espéré que la fête pourrait recommencer un jour, je ne voulais pas croire que le destin m'avait fait naître dans une maison déjà promise à la démolition.

People will remember what they have destroyed of others' theories, but the theories they construct themselves will inevitably be destroyed and even ridiculed by those who come after. That is the law of science. Poetry does not have a similar law. It never negates what has come before it and is never negated by what follows. Poetry lives in complete calm through the centuries.

If the Persians live in the past it is because the past is their homeland and the present is a foreign country where nothing belongs to them.

And afterwards, if you had asked any of the survivors how they had managed it, they would not have been able to tell you. It was as if those days in the forest, the escape to the city, had passed in a trance. The mind creates an alternative state.

home is always located in the past. It is not enough for me to say, 'Arlington.' Also, it is a noun used strictly in the singular. The word 'homes' is antithetical to the idea of home.

When one remembers a scene from the past in which one is with a loved one who is now dead, it is not like a memory at all, but like a dream one is having before his death, a premonition. In this dream which preceded death, the person is tranquil and happy, and yet, without reason, you know he is to die. When we recall the dead, the past becomes a dream we are dreaming foretelling death, though in our waking moments we cannot properly interpret it or give it significance.

Years ago, my mother and I fell in love with Busybee's voice, its calm, even tone, and a smile which was always audible in the language. My father, meanwhile, is clipping his nails fastidiously, letting them fall on to an old, spread-out copy of the Times of India, till he sneezes explosively, as he customarily does, sending the crescent-shaped nail-clippings flying into the universe.

Anyway, if Calcutta today suffers in comparison, it's not really to other cities, but principally to itself and what it used to be. Anyone who has an idea of what Calcutta once was will find that vanished Calcutta the single most insurmountable obstacle to understanding, or sympathising with, the city today.

How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a cupboard, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?

People like my grandmother, who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection.

Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable.

The nostalgia I had come to treasure was a hypertrophied sense of the past as a place, a place with street signs and a figure atop a staircase that I recognized.

Memory marks the horizon of our consciousness, imagination its zenith.