Quotes About Memory

Una persona che amiamo resta sempre con noi, – disse. – Per tutta la vita, capisci?

They say your muscles have memory. Once you've trained your arms to swing a tennis racket or your legs to ride a bike, you can quit for a while - years even - and all it takes is picking up a racket or jumping on a bike again and your muscles remember what to do. They snap right back to performing the way you taught them. The heart is a muscle, too. And I've been training mine since I was a kid to fall in love with one particular person.

We are the sum of all we have done added to the sum of all that has been done to us.

Men cannot grieve as dogs do. But they grieve for many years.

History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.

The past is no further away than the last breath you took.

Do you do this because you live such short lives? Tell yourselves wild tales of what might happen tomorrow, and feel all the feelings of events that will never happen? Perhaps to make up for the pasts you cannot recall, you invent futures that will not exist.

Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever.

The problem is not that we forget the past. It is that we recall it too well. Children recall wrongs that enemies did to their grandfathers, and blame the granddaughters of the old enemies. Children are not born with memories of those who insulted their mother or slew their grandfather or stole their land. Those hates are bequeathed to them, taught them, breathed into them. If adults didn't tell their children of their hereditary hates, perhaps we would do better.

FitzChivalry Farseer, too long have you sojourned among the Elderlings, your memory spurned by the very people you saved. Too long have you been in a place where the months pass as if days. Too long have you walked among us in false guise, deprived of your name and your honor. Rise. Turn and face the folk of the Six Duchies, your folk, and be welcomed home at last.

It doesn't work that way. Silencing memories does not make them stop existing. Events cannot be undone by forgetting them.

If I enter the room as you are fastening your shoe, I can say, "There will be a lovely moon tonight," and then you will call it to mind. But before I call it forth for you, you have forgotten the moon. One can swiftly understand that for most moments of our lives, we have forgotten almost all of the world around us, except for what currently claims our interest.

It was hard to reconcile the drumbeats and lifted voices in the night with my memories of flames and the screams of dying men. How could humanity range so effortlessly from the sublime to the savage and back again?

Some part of me knew that was important. That once it would have mattered terribly to me.

She is dead. Dead so many years. Who could imagine that death lasts so much longer than life?

As dye soaks fibres, drawn into them to change their colour forever, so does a memory, stinging or sweet, change the fibre of a man's character.

Sometimes it is easier to pull a knife out of a man than to ask him to forget words you have uttered.

Sometimes, when one goes back to the scene of one's childhood, things seem smaller. What was mysterious and the sole province of adults suddenly seems commonplace and mundane when viewed with mature eyes.

It was a simple account of an incident from his childhood. At the time I recall that I wondered why he had written it down. He obviously remembered it clearly; why bother to record it on paper? Only later was I to learn from my own obsessive journaling of my dreams that sometimes the best way to understand something is to write it down." p. 355

I sometimes think that age is based more on what you've done and what you remember than how old you are.

And in that brief linking, I knew that the girl was dead.

And yet it was not Buckkeep that came to my mind, but a meadow overlooking the sea, and a girl in bright red skirts who beckoned me. A time, rather than a place. No road led there anymore.

We are marching toward death as soon as we are born. The only hope a man has is that his family line will remain, that his sons will go forward to father more sons, and that his name will be remembered by them.

The problem is not that we forget the past. It is that we recall it too well. Children recall wrongs that enemies did to their grandfathers, and blame the granddaughters of the old enemies.