Quotes About Memory

His longing is such that Rex's absence becomes something like a presence, a scalpel left behind in his gut.

Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitary

Anthony Doerr

It's the absence of all the bodies, she thinks, that allows us to forget. It's that the sod seals them over.

every lost book, before it vanished forever, got down to one final copy somewhere, and how it made Hillary think about seeing a white rhinoceros in a zoo in Czechoslovakia once, how the sign said the rhino was one of the last twenty northern white rhinos in the world, the only one left in Europe

Over time his images of the baby, like photographs handled too often, had worn down and creased, lost their definition.

All the next day the pleasure of his success lingers in Werner's blood, the memory of how it seemed almost holy to him to walk beside big Volkheimer back to the castle, down through the frozen trees, past the rooms of sleeping boys ranked like gold bars in strongrooms...

Repository,'' he finally says, ''you know this word? A resting place. A text - a book - is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.

Todo dia, ela tira um tempo para se perder nos reinos da memória...

A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.

every second it feels as if her father slips farther away.

He was numb forever. What clockless hours passed, what weeks and months? He didn't know.

Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitrary.

He sees enough in three weeks to provide ten lifetimes of nightmares.

But when she imagined college she thought of her dreary days in the schoolhouse in Lushoto, the heat of classrooms, the impatience of mathematics, bland two-dimensional maps pinned to walls. Green for land, blue for water, stars for capital cities. Schoolmasters obsessed with naming things that had existed unnamed for a million years.

Memories, when they come, are often viscous and weak, trapped beneath distant surfaces, or caught in neurofibrillary tangles. She

books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.

the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.

He was about twenty-six when he died

They spoke of training public speakers under five traditional headings: inventio, seeking out ideas or lines of argument; collocatio, structure and organization; elocutio, diction and style; actio, physical delivery; and memoria, memory (speeches could last for hours and as they were spoken not read they had to be learned by heart).

He never forgave her and never saw her again.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

I remember a moment when the Prince went back to his old school, Grammar School in Melbourne, and slightly to his horror his old music teacher produced a cello.