Quotes About Memory

There are so many moments to remember and sometimes I think that maybe we're not really people at all. Maybe moments are what we are.

I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.

One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breathe, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives--transitoriness and oblivion.

Lo que se enfatiza en todo momento es el olvidar, el borrar, el dejar y el reemplazar.

But all memories, no matter how distant, no matter how distorted, have the shadow of truth underneath. Even the most imperfect memory is a window—

It is a lonely thing, remembering for someone else.

To have a good memory is to be both blessed and cursed Ã¢â'¬Â¦

Did I ever tell you about the time....

Remember us. Remember us as we used to be, before the universe turned against us. Young, beautiful, strong, brave, admirable, loved, loving...' --Alema Rar

But we don't get to choose what sticks. How many times I have run my fingers along a picket fence and thought, This! I will remember this moment always! and all that remains is the memory of a desire to hold on to a memory.

The process is a lot like writing. You start with a wisp of memory, or some detail that won't let you be. You write, you cross out. You write again, revise, feel like giving up. What pulls you through? Curiosity.

I have been trying to remember being young, which is hard because I don't feel old until I try to get up from my chair. Or when I look at the photograph Jennifer took of me sitting on a stool next to her twins, and really, from the back, it looks as if I have an open umbrella concealed under my skirt. How did that happen? I think, but, oh well, I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It's somebody else's turn now.

The past is not as interesting to me now as it was when I was young

But I have to resist the impulse to create memories suitable for framing.

She likes to think this is a real memory, but she doesn't know that she isn't making it up.

have not got to where I vow to remember this. But we don't get to choose what sticks. How many times I have run my fingers along a picket fence and thought, "This! I will remember this moment always!" and all that remains is the memory of a desire to hold on to a memory. My uncle told me that every fall the dragonflies in Brazil return to the lake where they were born to touch down once more before dying. I have taken it on myself to remember this for him.

Shhh," she wants to say to her husband as he speaks a pleasantry in her ear, "I am remembering being lonely.

The past gets swallowed up in the extraordinary circumstances of now. But mostly it hurts too much to let my mind go back.

Once upon a time, when I was young, his forgetting might have rendered my memory meaningless. I no longer require so much from life.

Is memory property? If two people remember something differently is one of them wrong? Wasn't my memory of a memory also real?

that method of storytelling is forgotten, that time of Eddie's in which everyone seemed to add memory on memory deep in the forest, layers of dirt and leaves and branches get covered up—in a sense the past is underfoot.

To us, recollection is a holy act; we sanctify the present by remembering the past. To us Jews, the essence of faith is memory. To believe is to remember.

A great event, miraculous as it may be, if it happened only once, will hardly be able to dominate forever the mind of man.

Two sources of religious thinking are given us: memory (tradition) and personal insight. We must rely on our memory and we must strive for fresh insight.