Quotes About Memory

You remind me of a smoked cigarette.

Things are sweeter when they're lost.

He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.

The past--the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember.

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typical one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her memory at the mention of swimming.

For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!

Then he put in a call for Nicole in Zurich, remembering so many things as he waited, and wishing he had always been as good as he had intended to be.

The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised.

His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was

For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

there's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal-- a small boy appeared beside them and, swinging a handful of banana peels, flung them valiantly in the direction of the potomac.

Forgotten is forgiven.

I'd rather keep it as a beautiful memory-- tucked away in my heart.' 'Yes, women can do that-- but not men. I'd remember always, not the beauty of it while it lasted, but just the bitterness, the long bitterness.' 'Don't!

I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that afternoon…

You can't repeat the past.

The cool bathed his eyes and slowed the flight of time-time, that had crept so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so intangible in the long spring twilights.

he told me all the things he liked to THINK he thought in the misty past.

But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.

But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

Such a kiss--it was a flower held against the face, never to be described, scarcely to be remembered; as though her beauty were giving off emanations of itself which settled transiently and already dissolving upon his heart.

Afterwards he remembered one reply of hers to something he had asked her. He remembered it in this form – perhaps he had unconsciously arranged and polished it.

Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever.