Quotes About Memory

I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.

How close the dead are. One song away from the living.

He always possessed an unusual, self-protective capacity to suppress unpleasant memories and keep alive those things that fortified his resolve.

She had not remembered then what she remembers now, a memory like something buried in river silt that finally works free and rises to the surface...

It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood. And now this brown-eyed child. Don't love it, Rachel told herself. Don't love anything that can be taken away.

all the while remembering what it had felt like when the world you knew had up and vanished, and you needed to find something to bring that world back, and you weren't sure that you could.

Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present's surface.

But as Rachel watched the sheriff enter the front door, it was hard to believe the farmhouse itself was still there, because a place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world. The earth itself shouldn't be able to abide it.

An image came back to him with such vividness that it might have been framed before him in glass

Then her mind had wandered into a place she could not follow, taking with it all the people she knew, their names and connections, whether they still lived or whether they'd died. But her body lingered, shed of an inner being, empty as a cicada husk.

It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief that was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood.

Rachel kneeled beside Jacob. She took the child's hand and pressed it to the dirt. Her father had told Rachel that Harmons had been on this land since before the Revolutionary War. Don't ever forget what it feels like, Jacob, she whispered, and let her hand touch the ground as well.

learn: v.t. to acquire knowledge of or skill in by study, instruction, practice, or experience—to commit to memory—to come to know or be aware of. Obviously

Knowledge of a subject doesn't necessarily mean you can do anything with it. That would require skill. Likewise, a student can commit something to memory with no knowledge whatsoever. A grade-schooler, for example, might be able to recite the multiplication table perfectly, but still be unable to solve simple math problems. Coming to know something implies the goal of being able to use the knowledge, while being aware of facts or figures does not. Of

Those complicated curls of hers remind me of the codicils to my poor dear Leslie's will.

I have no recollection of that ever happening.

Cuando morimos nos llevamos un pedazo del mundo.

Ni siquiera la pirámide más monumental es suficiente para defendernos de la muerte.

Cuando un muerto se va, se lleva consigo su mundo.

la memoria es traidora, débil, mentirosa.

Así se van perdiendo los días y la vida, en el despeñadero de la desmemoria.

Como no he tenido hijos, lo más importante que me ha sucedido en la vida son mis muertos

Because my memory is a lie." "Mine, too. All memories are lies. We all invent the past. Do you think my parents were really the way I remember them today?

6 de noviembre de 1906