Quotes About Memory

The receding perspective of my past smothers my present. Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.

Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.

I can dig out the old chestnut from George Santayana, that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," but it serves no purpose. It's a hopelessly optimistic quote. We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not. It is inevitable; just ask Nietzsche (eternal return) or Hegel (history repeats itself) or James McCourt (history repeats itself like hiccups).

I'd dismembered it in my memories. I'd disremembered it.

The memory seems both real and unreal, reliable and tenuous, solid and insubstantial.

We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not. It is inevitable; just ask Nietzsche (eternal return) or Hegel (history repeats itself) or James McCourt (history repeats itself like hiccups). Beirutis

It's just that our memories are rarely where we think they are.

Memory is a wound, you said. And some things are released only by the act of writing. Unless I go in with my scalpel and suction to excavate, to clean, to bring into light, that wound festers, and the gangrene of decay will eat me alive.

Other people are hazy phenomena that become corporeal only in my memories.

We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not.

Memory, memoir, autobiography - lies, lies, all lies.

I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it.

I lie on my side, head sunk in the pillow, waiting for first light, for the lift of the curtain, waiting for you, how your right hand used to entwine with my left in a slow dance, how our bodies fit in bed, yet you didn't show up.

When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.

In the early pages of his gorgeous novel Sepharad, Antonio Munoz Molina writes: "Only those of us who have left know what the city used to be like and are aware of how much it has changed; it's the people who stayed who can't remember, who seeing it day after day have been losing that memory, allowing it to be distorted, although they think they're the one who remained faithful, and that we, in a sense, are deserters.

No nostalgia is felt as keenly as nostalgia for things that never existed. I

Tell him Sudha has not forgotten him.

Cuando mi voz calle con la muerte, mi corazón te seguirá hablando".

Peace, my heart, let the time for the parting be sweet. Let it not be a death but completeness. Let love melt into memory and pain into songs. Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of the wings over the nest. Let the last touch of your hands be gentle like the flower of the night. Stand still, O Beautiful End, for a moment, and say your last words in silence. I bow to you and hold up my lamp to light you on your way.

hidden in my eyes; I will thread your image like a gem on my joy and hang it on my bosom.

My songs are like bees; they follow through the air some fragrant trace — some memory — of you, to hum around your shyness, eager for its hidden store. When the freshness of dawn droops in the sun, when in the noon the air hangs low with heaviness and the forest is silent, my songs return home, their languid wings dusted with gold.

Thou hast left thy memory as a flame to my lonely lamp of separation

Tol ajal kui tervisehäired eksisteerisid ainult ta ettekujutlustes, oli see ta lemmikkõneaineks; nüüd aga, mil ta tervis oli tõesti korrast ära, ei tuletanud ta oma kannatusi kunagi meelde.

For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it is a pity that you use it so little.