Quotes About Memory

I grasped after the ghost of a memory. It vanished.

Debit me, one Memento Mori

He felt her cold lips touch his eyes, like coins for Charon. After a time he heard her singing... The song was a piece of forever.

Depression is a red herring, said Nariman. I think a lot about the past, it's true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. and there is not much percentage in the future.

Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be recreated – not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.

The answers were not easy to come by, they lay in the garden of the past, which memory had dug up and replanted in plots of its own choosing.

And the further they go, the more they'll remember, they can take it from me.

The future was becoming past, everything vanished into the void, and reaching back to grasp for something, one came out clutching - what? A bit of string, scraps of cloth, shadows of the golden time. If one could only reverse it, turn the past into future, and catch it on the wing, on its journey across the always shifting line of the present ...

She did not notice that already, in her memory, those months […] of fretting and tardiness, quarrels and crooked seams, had been transmuted into something precious, to be remembered with yearning.

This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.

We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.

In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon's youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: 'I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.' Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it.

What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: She is going to die: I shudder… over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What grace might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered on my way?

And, long after the amorous relation is allayed, I keep the habit of hallucinating the being I have loved: sometimes I am still in anxiety over a telephone call that is late, and no matter who is on the line, I imagine I recognize the voice I once loved: I am an amputee who still feels pain in his missing leg.

Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.

The measurement of mourning: eighteen months for mourning a father, a mother.

Lo que la Fotografía reproduce al infinito únicamente ha tenido lugar una sola vez: la Fotografía reproduce mecánicamente lo que nunca más podrá repetirse existencialmente.

Dreamed of maman again. She was telling me—O cruelty!—that I didn't really love her. But I took it calmly, because I was so sure it wasn't true. The idea that death would be a kind of sleep. But it would be horrible if we had to dream eternally. (And this morning, her birthday. I always gave her a rose. Bought two at the little market of Mers Sultan and put them on my desk)

the love which is over and done with passes into another world like a ship into space, lights no longer winking

I never know the loved being's voice except when it is dead, remembered, recalled inside my head, way past the ear; a tenuous yet monumental voice, since it is one of those objects which exist only once they have disappeared

I could read my nonexistence in the clothes my mother had worn before I can remember her.

Cosa rara, su voz que conocía tan bien, de la que se dice que es el grano mismo del recuerdo (" la querida inflexión..."), no la oigo. Como una sordera localizada...