Quotes About Memory

History is personal

Everything she loved had already happened and had already been.

When you fall in love like that, time doesn't matter. This was the secret he told Maria, the last words he ever said.

If you are loved, you never lose the person who loved you. You carry them with you all your

History was easy: the past with all loss burned out of it, all sorrow worn out of it—all that was merely personal comfortably removed

The owner's wife gave me a container of chicken soup and a quart of rice pudding to take home. She was a broad, solid woman with thick arms and legs. She swiped vigorously at the stain on my coat with a wad of dampened paper towel, and I remembered Pegeen then: There's always someone nice.

WHEN JOHN AND MARY KEANE said "during the war," their children imagined the world gone black and white, imagined a hand passing like a dark cloud over the earth, blotting out the sun for what might only have been the duration of a single night, or the length of a storm. Long before any of them was born, after all, their parents, the world itself, had emerged from that shadow.

Mary lifted her own steno book. Only about six pages old, it still had its cool, slim heft and straight cardboard covers. By the end of the month, its pages would be bloated with the pencil strokes of her shorthand, its back would be cracked and its edges softened. And then she would begin another. The march of time. Pauline's eyes

Like exiles, their delight was not in where they now found themselves but in whatever they could remember about the place, and the time, they had abandoned.

But now as she watched her cousin's husband . . . , the little boy asleep against him, she felt only a dazzling and depthless loss. Not because her own child would never know its father, the father never know what rest his body had been formed to give, but because she was not the child she had once been but would never be again. Because the shoulder and chest and arms that had once so casually and so thoroughly held her had left the earth long before she had lost her need for them.

He put his hand out to his daughter, pulled her up easily over the edge. And then bent to gather the shoes and toys, swinging the canvas straps of the two toy machine guns over his shoulder (surprised to find that some mistaken memory had caused him—momentarily—to be surprised to find they had no weight). Jacob

The paper detritus that she had somewhere read, or had heard it said, trails armies, or was it (she had seen a photograph) the scraps of letters and wrappers and snapshots that blow across battlefields after all but the dead have fled?

They recount their earliest memories without any sympathy for the child they once were

And this succeeded so completely because children want to love their parents and prefer not to look the truth in the face. The truth is too awful for these children to bear, so they avert their eyes. But the body remembers everything, and as adults those children unconsciously and automatically rehearse their parents' sadism on their own children, on their subjects or employees, on everyone dependent on them.

The life-saving function of repression in childhood is transformed in adulthood into a life-destroying force.

Marcel Proust was denied the chance to decipher the enigma of his life. I believe that the quest for "lost time" in the title of his great novel was the quest for the life he never lived. In

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it.

Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, were something happened, and then there are all the other places

I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore.

The job she had to do, as she saw it, was to remember everything—and by "remember" she meant experience it in her mind, one more time—then store it away forever. This day's experience set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside.

My mother had not let anything go. Inside that self we knew, which might at times appear blurred a bit, or sidetracked, she kept her younger selves strenuous and hopeful; scenes from the past were liable to pop up any time, like lantern slides, against the cluttered fabric of the present.

WHEN I was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother said was what I had always wanted. Where she got this idea I did not know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter.

I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore.

She would lean her head against the back pillow of the sofa, thinking that she lay in his arms. You would not think that she'd remember his face but it would spring up in detail, the face of a creased and rather tired-looking, satirical, indoor sort of man. Nor was his body lacking, it was presented as reasonably worn but competent, and uniquely desirable.