Quotes About Memory

Dislike required energy and a good memory for slights; geniality was so much less demanding, and at the end of the day felt better too.

Go to any small village anywhere in the world, and see what they remember. Everything. It's all there -- passed on like a precious piece of information, some secret imparted from one who knew to one who yearns to know. Taken good care of.

It is the onion, memory, that makes me cry," he said.

and with it would come that wonderful, unmistakable smell of rain, that smell of dust and water meeting that lingered for a few seconds in the nostrils and then was gone, and would be missed, sometimes for months, before the next time that it caught you and made you stop and say to the person with you, any person: That is the smell of rain, there, right now.

When Emma was five, Mrs. Woodhouse died. Emma did not remember her mother. She remembered love, though, and a feeling of warmth. It was like remembering light, or the glow that sometimes persists after a light has gone out.

One might forget so many exotic cheeses, he thought, but the memory of cheddar always remained. Should one be embarrassed by choosing cheddar every time? he asked. Matthew laughed. There's no need to apologize for simple things. But is cheddar simple? Domenica enquired. Just because there's a lot of it, does that make it simple?

We forget, she thought. We think that we were always the way we are now, but we were not. —

Already many of the memories of the previous two weeks had faded: the smell of that small hotel in St. Andrews; that mixture of bacon cooking for breakfast and the lavender-scented soap in the bathroom; the air from the sea drifing across the golf course; the aroma of coffee in the coffee bar in South Street. She should have noted them down. She should have said something about all that and the light and the hills with sheep on them like small white stones.

the past has a much bigger shadow than people believe. It's still with us in so many ways. At our side all the time, whispering into our ear.

wise men are remembered, they always are.

She used the expression that the Batswana preferred: to become late. There was human sympathy here; to be dead is to be nothing, to be finished. The expression is far too final, too disruptive of the bonds that bind us to one another, bonds that survive the demise of one person. A late father is still your father, even though he is not there; a dead father sounds as if he has nothing further to do--he is finished.

One might forget so many exotic cheeses, he thought, but the memory of cheddar always remained.

reunions, she felt, were not much more than a scratching at the vague itch of memory. And like scratching, they rarely helped—indeed, scratching often made matters worse, as any dermatologist would tell you.

but to the north there was a bank of cirro-cumulus, a mackerel sky, or Schaefchenwolken—"sheep cloud"—as she remembered her father calling it. For some reason he had used German when talking about clouds and sea conditions; an odd habit that she had accepted as just being one of the things he did. "The weather," he had once said to her, smiling, "is German. I don't know why; it just is. Sorry.

Memories of that which we have lost are curious things - weeks, months, even years may pass without recollection of them and then, quite suddenly, something will remind us of a lost friend, or of a favourite possession that has been mislaid or destroyed, and then we think: Yes, that is what I have had and I have no longer

the mokopa, which was long and black and very poisonous and which was well-known to hate humans because of some distant wrong in snake memory.

We all have Proustian moments, but don't really know about it until we read Proust.

The glow left by the sun is like a good act done, she thought; or like love, which left the same warm signature behind it.

And then something happened that had only happened once or twice before, but when it had done so, it had burned itself into her memory. Her father was there. Somehow, in a way known only to late people, he had slipped into the cab of the van and was seated beside her. Of course, she could not see him—not in the physical sense—but of his presence she had absolutely no doubt.

every man has a map in his heart of his own country and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map.

It had given her pleasure to do things for him in his lifetime, and now it was a pleasure to do things for his memory. But the memory of a father went only so far.

There's a poem about onions," she said. "It's about how memory is like an onion—it makes you cry.

We don't forget...Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, smells of places, of little things that happened to us and which come back, unexpectedly, to remind us of who we are.

To lose your own language was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way.