Quotes About Memory

She could feel herself pressing the details into memory, saving them like dried flowers kept in a spinster's chest, relics of a past that might have been, of a future that never was.

What a very odd thing,' said Janie, 'to live and leave no mark.

At a certain point, memory begins to be a burden.

I hadn't realized till then how a thought, once you have thought it, can never be laid to rest. It may lay low, but any time it can pop right up again, put certain words in your mouth.

Fruity said, "It went in one ear and out the other." Baba said, "Not surprising. There's very little in between to stop it.

Tomorrow we're to visit the Dardanelles. Jack Aird speaks of them as though I should know them, but I really don't recall them. One meets so many people.

I am not going to think about it. It was ugly, but it's over, and I'm not going to think about it.

I just want to sleep. The whole point of not talking about it, of silencing the memory, is to make it go away. It won't. I'll need brain surgery to cut it out of my head.

Which was better: being alive (if that was the right word) but not remembering anything, or being dead?

thoughts hidden there? If she can, what will she do? Call the cops? Send me to the nuthouse? Do I want her to? I just want to sleep. The whole point of not talking about it, of silencing the memory, is to make it go away. It won't. I'll need brain surgery to cut it out of my head. Maybe I should wait until David Petrakis is a doctor, let him do it.

The whole point of not talking about it, of silencing the memory, is to make it go away.

The warped perception of time is a hallmark of trauma.

The difference between forgetting something and not remembering it is big enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler through.

She laid land mines in my skill that detonated weeks later.

The word ghost sounds like memory. The word therapy means exorcism

The whole point of not talking about it, of silencing the memory, is to make it go away. It won't.

My momma and poppa appeared from the shadows. They flew to me and wrapped their arms around me and cooled my face with their ghost tears.

A wasting memory is not only a destroyer; it can deny one's very existence. A day unremembered is like a soul unborn, worse than if it had never been. What indeed was that summer if it is not recalled? That journey? That act of love? To whom did it happen if it has left you with nothing? Certainly not to you. So any bits of warm life preserved by the pen are trophies snatched from the dark, are branches of leaves fished out of the flood, are tiny arrests of mortality.

This is not a midlife crisis car," I corrected him. "This is a midlife memory car!

You translate it, please. I have worked hard to forget what Greek I once knew.

And why was this third dream still with me, lingering at my shoulder like some telegraph boy awaiting a reply?

You know what I realized?" "What?" "Most of the people I know are dead. I guess that happens

You may recall a Jules Feiffer cartoon—you may recall a hundred

wrote it in the summer of 1959 in my furnished room at the Hotel Rio, on West Forty-Seventh Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues.