Quotes About Memory

For a long while the past drops away from you easily and it would seem automatically, properly. Its scenes don't vanish so much as become irrelevant. And then there's a switchback, what's been all over and done with sprouting up fresh, wanting attention, even wanting you to do something about it, though it's plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story. [ A Conversation with Alice Munro , BookBrowse, 1998]

Algo había ocurrido allí. En la vida tienes unos cuantos sitios, o quizá uno solo, donde ocurrió algo, y después están todos los demás sitios.

You remember your history?" He had finished five years of high school with respectable marks and a very good showing in trigonometry and geography but did not remember much history. In his final year, anyway, all you could think about was that you were going to the war. He said, "Not altogether.

I went around the house to the back door thinking, I have been to a dance and a boy has walked me home and kissed me. It was all true. My life was possible.

She barely notices when I say that I am going on to Toronto to visit my grandparents. Except to remark that they must be really old. Not a word about Alister. Not even a bad word. She would not have forgotten. Just tidied up the scene and put it away in a closet with her former selves. Or maybe she really is a person who can deal recklessly with humiliation.

You know one reason I know he's not dead?' said Sonje. 'I don't dream about him.

Durante mucho tiempo te desprendes del pasado con facilidad y de una forma que parece automática y adecuada. Las escenas del pasado, más que desvanecerse, dejan de tener importancia. Y entonces se produce una brusca vuelta atrás, lo que está acabado y bien acabado resurge de repente, requiere tu atención, incluso que hagas algo al respecto, aunque salte a la vista que no se puede hacer nada.

Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind," her friend Marie Mendelson has told her. "When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.

Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind,' her friend Marie Mendelson has told her. 'When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only one place, where something has happened. And then there are the other places, which are just other places.

The thing that was your bright treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember

Everyone was wrong. She was not timid or acquiescent or natural or pure. When you died, of course, these wrong opinions were all there was left.

But once in a while came a moment where everything seemed to have something to say to you. The rocking bushes, the bleaching light. All in a flash, in a rush, when you couldn't concentrate (...) so you get the wrong idea, surely the wrong idea. That somebody dead might be alive and in Jakarta.

I could see a nostril, an ear, plugged up with greenish mud. . . . I don't think I really saw all this. . . . I must have heard someone talking about that and imagined that I saw it.

This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don't think about it at all. The thing that was your bright treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.

Ja vaikka he edelleen esiintyivät minun ei kovin eroottisissa kuvitelmissani, he olivat jo poissa. Jotkut heistä, monet heistä, lopullisesti poissa.

Every one of us will be forgotten, Sophia thought but did not say, because of the tender sensibilities of men—particularly of a young man—on this point.

Hey, Ocean Eyes," my father said. "Where'd you go on us?

Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?

I left my mark on that man.

I was in the air around him. I was in the cold mornings he had now. I was in the quiet time he spent alone. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. -Susie Salmon

Do you miss Susie? Because it was dark, because Ruth was facing away from her,because Ruth was almost a stranger, Lindsey said what she felt. More than anyone will ever know.

He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.