Quotes About Memory

"In the days of my youth, I remembered my God,And he hath not forgotten my age."

Yet leaving here a name, I trust,That will not perish in the dust.

We tell ourselves our own stories, selectively, in order to keep our sense of self intact.

He would keep what he would always believe had to be a false memory of her falling like a booted Icarus out of a lighted sky in which there was somehow falling snow and her mouth open in a lovely O that had started to shape a word, and her long legs against the electric light, shooting out of the blue plastic square that rose like a kite lifting on a whirlwind and one of her boots flying what seemed the length of the block

Deep in their rat tendons, rats know history.

Ubi tu Gaius, ego Gaia, she would say to her husband, who lifted her in his arms to cross the threshold, in memory (so it was believed) of the rape of the Sabines, but doubtless also because the threshold was sacred: it was the god Limentinus.

All that is fair shall pass away; all that I love, all that I fear for—these shall the doctor take away, lifting them from my memory on the point of a steel blade. What has he to give in return? A hell of vapour, distorting sight; a hell of sound, drowning the soul.

The main fact of life for me is love or its absence. Whether life is worth living depends for me on whether there is love in life. Without a sense of it, or even the memory…of it, I think I would lose heart completely. (p. vii)

Sad and sweet and wise Here a child reposes Dust is on his eyes, Quietly he lies - Satan, strew Roses.

Any great "experience"—irrespective of how much bliss it may bestow—remains for some time, and then leaves.

What's more, when we recount an experience to someone, the act of recounting it changes the memory of it. So if we reshape the story a bit each time—omitting inconvenient facts, exaggerating convenient ones—we can, over time, transform our actual belief about what happened. Which presumably makes it easier to convince others that our story is true.

Llegará un día en el que alguien pronunciará por última vez nuestro nombre en el mundo. Es el instante de la muerte definitiva.

El olvido era la muerte postrera y definitiva de las cosas y la gente.

Por definición, los recuerdos son una versión personal, libre y subjetiva de un individuo, y no postulan jamás a ser la historia oficial. Tienen la modestia de las manos callosas, la singularidad de un rostro, la limitación de una forma particular de sentir.

El olvido es el hijo consentido de la historia y el alero bajo el cual palpita la convivencia.

me dije que quizás la guerra principal en el mundo se libraba entre la amnesia y la memoria

Yo percibía inmensos espacios de tiempo entre mi ayer taciturno y mi hoy caviloso.

Life left us all where we were meant to be or where it was convenient to leave us and then forgot us, which is as it should be.

My gift to you will be an abyss, she said, but it will be so subtle you'll perceive it only after many years have passed and you are far from Mexico and me. You'll find it when you need it most, and that won't be the happy ending, but it will be an instant of emptiness and joy. And maybe then you'll remember me, if only just a little.

I remember scrutinizing his face. I remember drinking his face down to the last drop, trying to elucidate the character, the psychology of such an individual. And yet the only thing about him that has remained is my memory of his ugliness.

Nothing is ever behind us.

While he was waiting, leaning on the counter at a coffee place, he remembered the dream he'd had the night before about Antonio Jones, who had been dead for several years now. As before, he asked himself what Jones could have died of, and the one answer that occurred to him was old age. One day, walking down some street in Brooklyn, Antonio Jones had felt tired, sat down on the sidewalk, and a second later stopped existing.

For a while we talked about things I've forgotten now. Or maybe we were silent for a while, me sitting at the foot of his bed, him stretched out with his book, the two of us sneaking looks at each other, listening to the sound the elevator made, as if we were in a dark room or lost in the country at night, just listening to the sound of horses.

The girl replies that she was dreaming about her mother, who died not long ago. The dead are at peace, thinks B stretching out in the bed. As if she had read his mind, the girls says that no one who has passed through this world is at peace. Not anymore, not ever, she says with total conviction.