Quotes About Memory

I have learned that if the mind is allowed to dwell on a circumstance more and more details will present themselves and the memory becomes much more distinct.

An English speaker who has never studied French already knows around 15,000 French words!

The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been.

The past should be culled like a box of fresh strawberries, rinsed of debris, sweetened judiciously and served in small portions, not very often.

Tell me what you ate when you were a child, and whether the memory cheers you up or not.

One of the oddest things in life, I think, is the things one remembers. One chooses to remember, I suppose. Something in one must choose.

It is beyond endurance, the continued life of things, when the owner of those things is dead.

If I tell you something Leah, can you keep a secret? Conor pressed a callused finger across a petroglyph of a deer like a blind man etching memory into his brain.

Your mind will never lose anything forever that's worth keeping.

Like a glimpse of eternity instantly forgotten. She is gone.

Yet no one is really alone; those who live no more echo still within our thoughts and words, and what they did is part of what we have become — Blessing of Memory, Mediations Before Kaddish

Do you believe at times that a moment chooses you to remember it entirely & tell about it — so that it may live again? — Laure-Anne Bosselaar, from "Lately," Vox Populi (11 June 2022)

I sometimes go months without remembering you. Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.

Once upon a time wasn't as long ago as it used to be.

It was like noticing the sun. You couldn't help but see it, to turn to face the heat of it, to bask in the glory of it. But often when the sun is high in the sky, the moon is up there, too. A dim memory of what she will be in the night, but there, nonetheless, dim and misty, hard and white. At night, there is only the moon, the sun is nowhere to be seen. There are no distractions when the moon rules the sky.

People go away and they don't come back.

you don't need ghosts to be haunted. Memory does that just fine without any supernatural help at all.

Graves are for the living, not the dead.

I feel like one Who treads alone Some banquet-hall deserted, Whose lights are fled, Whose garlands dead, And all but he departed! Thus, in the stilly night, Ere slumber's chain has bound me, Sad memory brings the light Of other days around me. —THOMAS MOORE

This was one of those days when I thought that maybe a new life, a different life, wouldn't be so bad. But where the hell had I put the receipt, and could you return something that was over twenty years old? Where do you go to get a new life when your old one has you so puzzled you don't know how to fix it? Wish I knew.

Our distance has lived in me like the aftermath of a bad dream-I carry it around, the knowledge that we were once close, that something was lost; it's the lingering sadness of unfinished business. (18)

You remember that song by Jovanotti I say to you, in the river?" he asks. "Yes!" I swivel a little to look at him. "I looked it up, but I couldn't find it." "' La Valigia ,'" he says. "The suitcase. The boy is a suitcase, he travels all around, but only one person, the girl, knows how to open the lucchetto. " "The lock," I translate, suffused with happiness at this.

In the wake of a human being's death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of those who were dearest to them...Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain...a collective corona that still glows. - Douglas Hofstadter

I think I'll always love him.