Quotes About Memory

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

So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don't hold on to them the sea will take them too.

Some people write simply because they don't know how to live in the moment, I said, and have to reconstruct itand live in it afterwards.

It had been, in other words, our family home, and I had stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.

History goes over the top like a steamroller, she said, crushing everything in its path, whereas childhood kills the roots. And that is the poison, she said, that seeps into the soil.

It was nearly thirty years since his first marriage ended, and the further he got from that life, the more real it became to him. Or not real exactly, he said – what had happened since had been real enough. The word he was looking for was authentic: his first marriage had been authentic in a way that nothing ever had again. The older he got, the more it represented to him a kind of home, a place to which he yearned to return.

asked him what it was he was writing, and his smile widened. He said, I am writing about my childhood. I was so happy as a child, he continued, and I realised a little while ago that there was nothing I wanted so much as to recall it piece by piece, with every possible detail.

I believe there are certain moments in life that don't obey the laws of time and instead last forever, and this was one of them: I am living it still, Jeffers!

The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn't sure.

What is history other than memory without pain?' he said, smiling pleasantly and folding his small white hands together on the table in front of him. 'If people want to recapture some of those hardships, these days they go to the gym.

The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again.

É como passar em frente a uma casa onde se morou: o fato de ela ainda existir, tão concreta, faz tudo o que aconteceu desde então parecer de algum modo imaterial.

He had got into this habit, which more or less dispensed with the necessity for remembering anything, not because he tended to be forgetful but because his capacity for holding on to information, however useless or trivial, would otherwise have kept him in a state of constant distraction.

Foi então que se lembrou de que, provavelmente, Vicente nunca lera o Machado... Nem nada do que ela lia.

I often think that perhaps there is only a limited amount of memory going about the world, and that when it wants to live again, it steals its nest, like a cuckoo.

I heard it once again, coming to me across miles of air from a far away concert hall. I knew when I heard the drums begin their familiar beat of hammers on the wooden hulls what I had known so surely that night of his concert and out there alone with him in the sort, that nothing which has ever stirred the heard can be lost to us.

I heard it once again, coming to me across miles of air from a far away concert hall. I knew when I heard the drums begin their familiar beat of hammers on the wooden hulls what I had known so surely that night of his concert and out there alone with him in the storm, that nothing which has ever stirred the heard can be lost to us.

He looked into her face and tossed her sweater on the floor. "I thank God you walked out of my memory and into my life.

I remember exactly what you were wearing, [...] Dark suit, red tie, gold watch, and a blond woman.

Devon Hamilton-Zemaitis was a beautiful woman. Being dead didn't change that.

I'm more and more positive about this. So I don't know anything about my husband or life. The point is, I've married a good-looking multi-millionaire who loves me and has a huge penthouse and brought me taupe roses. I'm not going to throw it all away just because of the small detail that I can't remember him.

A weathered cork sat inside the box lined with green velvet. It had turned a darker brown and was a little shriveled, but the name Moet & Chandon was still clearly visible. Vivien reached inside and pulled out her mother's cork. The one she'd searched for in the bed of red impatiens. To anyone else, it was nothing. Just a weathered piece of nothing. To Vivien, it was everything.

I thought if I quit looking around for you, I would forget you. I thought if I avoided you, I could get you out of my head. But it didn't work.

It's strange to be near him again. I imagine it's like returning to your childhood home as an adult. The comfort and nostalgia eclipsed by the distortion of the dimensions. You remember it being bigger than it is. Because you're bigger than you were.