Quotes About Memory

My name is Lily Florabella Truax Beaupre, named after the woman who helped my mother, the woman who became my ghost.

My father had bought an ugly new clock, and it was ticking again in the quiet kitchen.

Things started going wrong, as far as Zhaanat was concerned, when places everywhere were named for people—political figures, priests, explorers—and not for the real things that happened in these places—the dreaming, the eating, the death, the appearance of animals.

On this stretch of highway he was afflicted. It felt as if his heart was being pierced by long sharp needles. He flashed on his father, the two of them sitting in late sunshine, gathering its fugitive warmth.

I've read that certain memories put down in agitation at a vulnerable age do not extinguish with time, but engrave ever deeper as they return and return.

Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson

I want to forget this year, but I'm also afraid I won't remember this year. I want this now to be the now where we save our place, your place, on earth.

There is very little said about how repetitious grief is.

Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabel Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson Sula, by Toni Morrison The Shadow-Line, by Joseph Conrad The All of It, by Jeannette Haine Winter in the Blood, by James Welch Swimmer in the Secret Sea, by William Kotzwinkle The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald First Love, by Ivan Turgenev Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai Sailboat

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides The Vixen, by Francine Prose Legends of the Fall, by Jim Harrison The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason

Many books and movies had in their plots some echoes of my secret experiences with Flora. Places haunted by unquiet Indians were standard. Hotels were disturbed by Indians whose bones lay underneath the basements and floors -- a neat psychic excavation of American unease with its brutal history.

Asleep, by Banana Yoshimoto The Hatak Witches, by Devon A. Mihesuah Beloved, by Toni Morrison The Through, by A. Rafael Johnson Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders Savage Conversations, by LeAnne Howe The Regeneration Trilogy, by Pat Barker Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth Songs for Discharming, by Denise Sweet Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57, by Gerald Vizenor

I'd taken a pink eraser to my childhood and blurred the pain.

Ghosts bring elegies and epitaphs, but also signs and wonders. What comes next? I want to know, so I manage to drag the dictionary to my side. I need a word, a sentence. The door is open. Go.

And so, you see, her absence stopped time.

Our conversations slide through time, and we dwell often on setting straight the town record.

There were so many sensations in his body that he couldn't feel them all at once, and each, as soon as he felt it, slipped away into the past.

Louise Erdrich

Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabel Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson Sula, by Toni Morrison The Shadow-Line, by Joseph Conrad The All of It, by Jeannette Haien Winter in the Blood, by James Welch Swimmer in the Secret Sea, by William Kotzwinkle The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald First Love, by Ivan Turgenev Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai

Even memories have their youth … When you let them grow old, they turn into revolting phantoms dripping with selfishness, vanity, and lies … They rot like apples

I've got quite a memory. Engraved in my mind, things are. I can't forget anything...It's not a sign of intelligence...Nothing to boast about, memory...that's just how it is...

The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget.

let's not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of the human viciousness we've seen without changing one word.

Things are different when you go back to them, they seem to have more power to enter into us more sadly, more deeply, more gently than before, to merge with the death which is slowly, pleasantly, sneakily growing inside us, and which we train ourselves to resist a little less each day.