Quotes About Memory

Niets staat geluk meer in de weg dan de herinnering aan geluk.

El recuerdo es una invención desdichada.

I am lost if I attempt to take count of chronology. When I think over the past, I am like a person whose eyes cannot properly measure distances and is liable to think things extremely remote which on examination prove to be quite near.

The though revives in him the oldest memory of his life. A child sees a door closing: without knowing who it is that has just left, he senses it is someone he loves with all his tiny, still mute being.

Non è che ci sarebbe voluto tutto questo tempo, ma il fatto è che quando hai sbancato i cassetti trovi una quantità di carte vecchie, scordate, alcune delle quali, quasi a forza, vogliono essere lette e tu, inevitabilmente, finisci col precipitare sempre più in fondo al gorgo della memoria e ti tornano in mente macari cose che per anni e anni hai fatto di tutto per scordare. E' un gioco tinto quello dei ricordi, nel quale finisci sempre per perdere.

Forse, pinsò Montalbano, abbisognava fari un gran monumento, come il Vittoriano a Roma dedicato al Milite Ignoto, in memoria dei lavoratori clandestini ignoti morti sul lavoro per un tozzo di pane.

The victim of encapsulating violence carries both the real fear and the memory of fear with her always. Together, they wash over her like an ocean, and if she does not learn to swim in that terrible sea, she goes under.

For some reason (working on Hoffmann) I remembered Armenia. A thunderstorm, and a shepherd drives his flock of sheep into the half-ruined church. 'Marmarashen'. A film

To live in the hearts of those we leave behind is not to die. Thomas Campbell 1777-1844 Inscription on the gates of Kensington Palace in the days of mourning before the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales

Where is the real Less? Less the young man terrified of love? The dead-serious Less of twenty-five years ago? Well, he has not packed him at all. After all these years, Less doesn't even know where he's stored.

Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like a memory.

Less is having a memory from nearly thirty years before: walking out of an Erasure concert with his friend, stoned, learning that the Democrats had retaken the Senate, and walking into this bar and declaring: "We want to sleep with a Republican! Who's a Republican?" And every man in the place raising his hand.

Bougainvillea bloomed on their porch like a discarded prom dress.

And yet what she has said--the lying brain--this is familiar; this has happened to him. Not exactly like this, not utter terrifying madness, but he knows his brain has told him things he has traveled around the world to forget. That the mind cannot be trusted is a certainty.

meaning his stuffed bear who was as real to him as his mother or me. Or else as imaginary.

I need you to do my bow tie. I forget how because I know you never will. Prizes aren't love, but this is love.

The beauty of his youth somehow taken from its winter storage and given back to him in middle age.

A pang of love and regret; the name of an old amour on your cruise ship's passenger list.

There is nothing like that for the boys who did not go to war; they were not soldiers, and did not die. They are burned out of history, for nothing blazes quite as hot as shame. There are no bills in circulation. But I have signed their names to this story. I have signed all of our names. How else will we be remembered?

Acting almost on a species memory, he runs forward, the glove before him.

I recall how the flash of her glowing dress against my closing eyelids was like the neon glow of hotels flashing VACANCY VACANCY on a long night ride. I felt the weight of my mind hanging from a branch, pulling, pulling, and before I knew it the stem had snapped and I was falling, blind, into the void.

It feels possible that memory will never be finished with this moment. Then they step apart.

What do we want from the past, anyway? For it to trifle with us no longer? For it to cease its surprises, its stirrings, its stings, for it to be fixed forever—for it to die? But the past is like those jellyfish that, when harmed, coil into themselves and revert to immature blobs from which they begin new lives and become, in simple terms, immortal. What can we do but look away from such painful miracles?

Is there a pill for when the image of a trumpet vine comes into your head? Will it erase it? Erase the voice saying, You should kiss me like it's good-bye? Erase the tuxedo jacket, or at least the face above it? Erase the whole nine years?