Quotes About Memory

The crushed teapot in the rubbish of the bulldozed house will sing in your ears forever.

Some people don't understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known. Or that was the nature, I should say, until man started to put things on paper.

Y es que hace mucho tiempo que no pienso en los muchachos. Y en los hombres no he pensado nunca.

Some people don't understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known.

Life was giving birth to children—who could have no memory of anything other than brutal enslavement—then dying and being tossed into a ravine or buried at the edge of a swamp or field.

A burnt finger remember the fire.

The voices of my friends at the Little School grew stronger in my memory. By publishing these stories I feel those voices will not pass unheard.

Four years after my father's death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me.

It's true that he didn't kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence steaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials... smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.

My mother must have bathed me hundreds of times. But it's my father rinsing me off with the purple metal cup that I remember most clearly. The suffusion of warmth as the hot water sluiced over me... ...the sudden, unbearable cold of its absence.

It's true that he didn't kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.

Bal, she whispered, her forehead resting against his chest as the seconds counted away. The only power I'd wish for is the power to turn back time.

You are who you think you are. You are what you remember.' 'You sure about that?' 'If you're not, then what the fuck are you?' 'What if you don't remember anything?' 'Ah,' Jason said, 'then you're in trouble.

Jess herself had not eaten fowl or roast or even fish in years, but the books awakened memories of turkey and thick gravy, and crab cakes, and rib-eye roasts. Redolent of smoke and flame, the recipes repelled and also reminded her of pink and tender meat, and breaking open lobster dripping with sweet butter, and sucking marrow out of the bones.

was about ten years old. It was called The Geek.

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

Without even intending it, there is that little shiver of a moment in time preserved in the crystal cabinet of the mind. A little shiver of internal space. That's what I was looking for.

How strange to remember anything, even a button much less a universe. 'What creature gives birth to itself?' The universe is mad, slightly mad.

34 coming up — I suddenly felt old — sitting with Walter & Raquel in Chinese Restaurant — they kissed — I alone — age of Burroughs when we first met.

La memoria es ficción. Seleccionamos lo más brillante y lo más oscuro, ignorando lo que nos avergüenza, y así bordamos el ancho tapiz de nuestra vida

what is not voiced scarcely exists; silence would gradually erase everything, and the memory would fade.

He knew by experience that he absorbed everything, that every event was imprinted in his memory, but that sometimes months or years passed before he realized how deeply an episode had marked him. It was as if memory congealed somewhere, then suddenly, through some mechanism of association, appeared before his eyes with blinding intensity.

Plus grands sont les amours, plus courte est la mémoire Vous l'avez oublié, nous en sommes tous là ; Le cÅ"ur le plus aimant n'est qu'une vaste armoire. On fait deux tours, et puis voilà.

In my old age, I have come to believe that love is not a noun but a verb. An action. Like water, it flows to its own current. If you were to corner it in a dam, true love is so bountiful it would flow over. Even in separation, even in death, it moves and changes. It lives within memory, in the haunting of a touch, the transience of a smell, or the nuance of a sigh. It seeks to leave a trace like a fossil in the sand, a leaf burning into baking asphalt.