Quotes About Memory

She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance.

Don't you miss the world?" He is quiet; so is she. Both ride spirals of memory. "I have the whole world right here," he says, and taps the cover of Darwin. "And in my radios. Right at my fingertips.

He is a ghost. He is from some other world. He is Papa, Madame Manec, Etienne; he is everyone who has left her finally coming back.

that a story is a way of stretching time.

Here was the worst curse: he managed to force the dream from his conscious mind often enough that when it returned to him (opening the pantry door, say, recalling the sweep of floodwater), the experience of it became fresh and bleeding once more.

It was love. He excavated a boot print she'd left on the snowy step outside his apartment and preserved it in his freezer.

Who had he been? A failed father, a runaway husband. A son. A packet of unopened letters. He was dead; he was dead.

What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?

Don't you miss the world?" He is quiet; so is she. Both ride spirals of memory.

Time slows. The attic disappears. Jutta disappears. Has anyone ever spoken so intimately about the very things Werner is most curious about? Open

Anthony Doerr

I think of you all the time, the veins in your throat, the fuzz on your arms, your eyes, your mouth. I loved you then, I love you now.

And yet by early autumn, once or twice a week, at certain moments of the day, sitting out in the Jardin des Plantes beneath the massive hedges or reading beside her father's workbench, Marie-Laure looks up from her book and believes she can smell gasoline under the wind. As if a great river of machinery is steaming slowly, irrevocably, toward her.

When I dream, I dream I am in the museum.

In the days following, he can hardly manage to comb his hair or convince his fingers to button his coat. His mind plays tricks, too: he walks into a room and forgets why he's there. He stares at a superior and forgets what the man just said.

She promises Etienne she will remember her age, not try to be everything to everyone, not fight the war by herself.

turning scarlet in her mind

Every time he blinks, a memory ripples across the undersides of his eyelids:

When all you have is a shard of papyrus with a few words on it...or a single line quoted in somebody else's text, the potential of what's lost haunts you. It's like the boys who died in Korea. We grieve them the most because we never saw the men they would become....How much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the earth.

All of it is burning. Every memory he ever made.

But what Marie-Laure remembered, standing at the rail as it whistled past, was her father saying that Foucault's pendulum would never stop. It would keep swinging, she understood, after she and her father left the Pantheon, after she had fallen asleep that night. After she had forgotten about it, and lived her entire life, and died.

Algumas tristezas nunca deixam de existir.

Somwhere across town she was standing at a sink or walking into a closet, his name stowed somewhere in the pleated neurons of her brain, echoing up one dendrite in a billion: David, David.

The more sentimental, the better.