Quotes About Memory

For the dead live only in us.

Less has come alive to his senses, his curiosity, his fears, his memory, and entered that separate realm of being in which the outer world does not vanish, not at all, but pricks with painful detail, the province not of the reader or the critic but of that suffering creature trapped behind the looking glass: the writer. For now Less is paying attention.

The worst of depression lies in a present moment that cannot escape the past it idealizes or deplores.

Even in the best of spirits, it's always been as though I wrestle with the present in a vain effort to stop its becoming the past.

I believe that pain needs to be transformed but not forgotten; gainsaid but not obliterated.

I told my mother that she was not going anywhere and that I would remember her for a good long time because she was going to go on reminding me of herself.

That's what hell means, perhaps, being compelled not just to live but to relive.

Why do we think only the dead haunt us, for the living are just as good at it?

Keep your eye on the ridgeline, never lose sight of winter's hem. This is how you'll like to remember yourself: standing slightly apart and moving away, knowing in that last tawny rush of the leaves: what goes out there, it never comes back.

The past believed in dates. And everyone's life consisted of dates, giving life a rhythm and sense of gradation, as if from the eminence of a date one could look back and down, and see the past itself. A clear, comprehensible past, divided up into squares of events, lines of paths taken.

We are no longer as close as before. Henryk is taking something from me. I cannot hold on to that which he will take with him when he goes. And that which is mine in him will die on the other side of the wall. Now there will be less of Pawelek.

The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.

And your own life while it's happening to you never has any atmosphere until it's a memory.

During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered.

I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything should just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment'.

Cambio de perfumes constantemente. Si he llevado uno tres meses, me obligo a dejarlo aun cuando todavía me guste seguir llevándolo; así, siempre que lo huelo de nuevo recuerdo aquellos tres meses. Nunca vuelvo a usarlo; se convierte en parte de mi colección permanente de olores.

Sometimes, we do ourselves a disservice to yearn for what we've lost. For if we try to find it again, we might discover faults and blemishes memory has been kind enough to erase.

Lawless men shrank back for fear of him; all the evildoers were confounded; and deliverance prospered by his hand. He embittered many kings, but he made Jacob glad by his deeds, and his memory is blessed forever. 1 Maccabees

Sometimes it seemed as if the past was a painting that she had dipped in water, allowing the colours to run and drip, merge and fade so that an entirely altered landscape remained.

Each house has its own signature, unknown to all except the grown children who go back to visit.

She felt with the shiver the rare sensation that she was exactly where she should be. She was an idea, a memory, one perfect possibility out of an infinite number.

she suddenly looks different to Olympia, physically different, as though a portrait has been alterred. And Olympia thinks that possibly such adjustments might have to be made for everyone she knows. Upon meeting a person, a sketch is formed, and for the life of the relationship, however intimate or not, a portrait is painted, with oils or pastels or with black ink or with watercolor, and only at a persons's death can the portraits be considered finished. Perhaps not even at the person's death.

To what extent does time distort memory>

her skin, which she has hardly