Quotes About Memory

I have seen romanticism outlast the realistic. I have seen men forget the beautiful women they have possessed, forget the prostitutes, and remember the first woman they idolized, the woman they could never have. The woman who aroused them romantically holds them.

Every word spoken in the past accumulated forms and colors in the self. What flows through the veins besides blood is the distillation of every act committed, the sediment of all the visions, wishes, dreams and experiences. All the past emotions converge to tint the skin and flavor the lips, to regulate the pulse and produce crystals in the eyes.

Nothing seems true today except the death of the goldfish who used to make love at ninety kilometers an hour in the pool. The maid has given him a Christian burial. To the worms! To the worms!

Die Vergangenheit war wie jene altmodischen, mit Kräutern und Blumen gefüllten Duftkissen, deren Aroma die Kleider durchdringt und an ihnen haften bleibt.

I have run away with a part of my treasures, my memories, my obsession, with preserving, portraying, recording. All of us may die, but in these pages we will continue to smile, talk, make love.

I came away with pieces of you sticking to me; I am walking about, swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous.

We write to taste life twice

a beautiful voice that haunted people

Henry:] Je pense à toi tous le temps.

I look around my room to see what I can offer you; I see only my silly water colors and notes—notes everywhere, and on the backs your name—show this to Anaïs, ask Anaïs, see Anaïs.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth.

For the writer the conscious mind may be the great inhibitor, the great censor. This conscious mind is created by social mores, education, environment, family pressures, and conventions. For creativity it is necessary to work with the unconscious which accumulates pure experience, reactions, impressions, intuitions, images, memories—an unconscious freed from the negative effect of societal evaluations. The conscious mind can only act later as critic, selector, discarder.

The past has a way of walking around in the present, behaving as if it were alive.

Mountains have the power to call us into their realms and there, left forever, are our friends whose great souls were longing for the heights. Do not forget the mountaineers who have not returned from the summits.

At the very least," she'd written to me once, "when we die we will be as if asleep, in the same place we were before birth, so why fear death? Scattered on the wind, unaware as we were before we came into this world, with no memory of any of it.

Perhaps someday it will be pleasant to remember even this. VIRGIL

That's the thing about suicide. Try as you might to remember how a person lived his life, you always end up thinking about how he ended it.

It's the way it should be- no distance between the living and the dead. Their stories are remembered, their spirits embraced.

Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.

Nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness.

the facts of history all appeared to me like specimens in a herbarium, permanently dried, so that it was easy to forget they had once upon a time been juicy with sap and alive in the sun.

But I think there comes a point in love, a unique moment which later on the soul seeks in vain to surpass, and that the effort to revive such happiness depletes it; that nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness.

Moi qui d'abord ne trouvais de goût qu'au passé, la subite saveur de l'instant m'a pu griser un jour, pensai-je, mais le futur désenchante l'heure présente, plus encore que le présent ne désenchanta le passé...

Because I don't want to remember, he answered. If I did, I might keep the future from happening by letting the past encroach upon it. I create each hour's newness by forgetting yesterday completely. Having been happy is never enough for me. I don't believe in dead things. What's the difference between no longer being and never having been?