Quotes About Memory

He looked down at her and caught a whiff of the honeysuckle fragrance of her hair. God, how he loved that smell. He'd planted fourteen honeysuckle bushes around his estate in Crestwood five years ago just to have a tiny piece of her there with him.

Then she smiled, and in that instant, if such a thing were possible, Pasquale fell in love, and he would remain in love for the rest of his life--not so much with the woman, whom he didn't even know, but with the moment.

What business does memory have with time?

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection the past then lives in your words and you are free.

People who keep journals have life twice.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

Forgetting is the precious balm that helps us to travel on, past the depredations of memory.

The old man began to sing. His voice was very lovely and obviously a part of something that the world had disposed of in its haste, evidence of a grander, kinder past.

The old man sang for a while, and Mora felt in her head the beginning of a long siege. A wilderness had crept up around a walled town, and the darkness of old woods and far-off places began to grow then, even within sight of where men walked together. By this she meant in her heart that all the useless things one remembers well just before waking and forgets just after were in fact very important and perhaps all that stood now between herself and oblivion.

For where he had been the largeness of her life, now his loss was; his loss was, and the worth of what he had been: those two things together became the core

When the person you love has died, any indication that they once lived is received gratefully, or alternatively, you want to pretend that nothing good has ever taken place in the world.

Your life has been made up of chambers, a series of chambers, so the interlocutor said, his hand on my arm — and in each chamber it is difficult to remember exactly what it was like to be in the previous room. You can remember that certain things happened when you were a child. But, what it was like to be there, to be a child, it really is lost to you. Our world is a difficult succession of losses, vaguely remembered, vaguely enshrined.

I smell the wet black dirt and remember days in the garden, when it would have been possible to stand and run to my wife or stand and run to my son. But I did not do so. I concerned myself with parsley or yams or pulling weeds. I had so much and all at once. There is too much light in those thoughts. Light everywhere. It obliterates me. I recoil.

Wes imagined that, in some other distant world, if he remembered nothing else about his father, he would remember that his hand trembled when he drank water. That, or the fact that his eyes teared up whenever he heard "Brown-Eyed Girl" on the radio.

It is in MEMORY that you see your past and your present in Sight.

If you tell the truth, you don't need a long memory.

I am not simply missing one child who never grew, but two of them. I always know how old they'd be. What I do not know is who I might have been, had I become their mother.

I typed my whole syntax table into memory. I said, "I'll just follow along in memory and, if what he types fits the syntax table, then whenever he hits return, I know all the elements he typed in." I just output a list of little tokens that represented what had been typed in, if it matched the table. This was just an idea I had, not knowing how other people did it. I don't know to this day how compilers are written.

Standing at the grave, Marianne was suddenly aware of her own blindness; her dearest friends were like dreams she had woken from. How had she missed so much?

Dad did a U-turn to take us back to the gas station so we could collect our winnings. My parents clung to the happiness of that ticket, thrilled to be rescued with a change in subject. We never stayed at my parents' friends' house again, but we also didn't talk about what I had said. Instead, we just went back to start. As if what I said happened to me happened to some other girl, in some other car, in some other life.

Why does the threat of violent death alter some of us, even if subtly, forever? Why does it make us unusually numb or calm when we ought to feel terrified? Why do scents or sounds trigger in some of us a feeling of terror or unbearable dread, even in situations where we know, at least, intellectually, that we are perfectly safe?

One can experience a situation of the past with the same freshness as if it occurred in the here and now; that is, one can re-create the past, bring it to life (resurrect the dead, symbolically speaking). To the extent that one does so, the past ceases to be the past; it is the here and now.

It is always the same. Whether you are walking or going by train, the way always seems shorter the second time than the first. (And that is true of distances that are not to be measured in miles and yards.)

Our damnable memory is a sieve. It wants to survive. And survival is only possible through forgetfulness.