Quotes About Memory

Painful recollections are always of the dead. And the dead decompose rapidly, and there remains even in the proximity of their tombs nothing but the beauty of nature, silence, the purity of air.

Young people don't know what age is, and old people forget what youth was.

Danger past, God forgotten.

The bare recollection of anger kindles anger.

Give me the waters of Lethe that numb the heart, if they exist, I will still not have the power to forget you.

And what happens if we don't remember? What happens if we never knew? Too many of us are here in the dark because in the rush and clamor of blood the third reptilian brain takes over, the one that says I do not recognize anything of myself in you, and so you are less than nothing.

Fact: like a telephone booth or a pair of size 6 Sasson jeans, the teen brain can hold only so much. This is doubly true when said information does not pertain to it. That's why teenagers are the original narcissists. It's not even in one ear, out the other. Truth is, 95% of stuff never wriggles in in the first place.

It was weird when I first saw the movie because it was like looking at a big-budget version of my home movies, or memories.

I don't know how he died, where he died, or where he's buried. But I do know I should've thanked him.

A liar should have a good memory.

Let no one weep for me, or celebrate my funeral with mourning for I still live, as I pass to and fro through the mouths of men.

Sometimes grownups forget stuff they've said.

childhood memories. But now, in 1822, his artistic horizons

What was she, after all, except the memory of all she had done, telling her the sort of person she was and guiding her next act consistently? Without that, what was left but blind chance and leaves blown meaninglessly through the trees?

Do you need anything before I go? I want you to return my wits, I long to say.

Are you the one named Alyse? For he calls that name in his sleep." "No, that is his beloved sister, dead these past three years." The depth of my disappointment that it is not my name he calls takes me completely by surprise. "Ah," the old nun says sympathetically, as if she somehow knows what I am feeling. "Then perhaps you are Sybella. That is the name he asks for when he is awake.

What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

No loss is felt more keenly than the loss of what might have been. No nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed.

Memory chooses to preserve what desire cannot hope to sustain.

In every evocation of a childhood scene, my stepfather's face is the least detailed, the most out of focus; when I think of him my memory's eyes have cataracts.

Forgetting is as integral to memory as death is to life.

We, like most humans, consider history a lesson on a blackboard that can be sponged off.

Childhood is played out in a foreign language and our memory of it is a Constance Garnett translation.

But to paraphrase the ever-paraphraseable Freud, who said something to the effect that when you speak about the past you lie with every breath you take, I will say this: When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.