Quotes About Memory

The past never truly dies. It is there, waiting, just below the surface of the now.

In the old house, the past hung in the air like motes of dust waiting to be illuminated by the sharp rays of memory

although his physician had advised him not to be overly concerned about forgetting facts and names, and he should begin to worry only if he stopped noticing that he couldn't remember them—if, in essence, he forgot that he was forgetting.

Badness lingered, and if blood penetrated deep enough into wood, the stain became near permanent. The past gave substance to the present, and all old places were storehouses of memory: the more ancient the site, the greater the accumulation, and bygone atrocities called to new.

There are places where years have no meaning, where only a hair's breadth of history separates the present from the past. Standing there on that bleak hillside, a young man in a place where other young men had died, it was possible to feel a connection to that past, a sense that in some place further back on the the stream of time these young men were still fighting, and still dying, that they would always be fighting this battle, in this place, over and over again, with ever the same end.

It's odd, but people are capable of forgetting quite extraordinary occurrences very quickly if it makes them happier to do so

He'd long ago figured that you knew you were aging when you couldn't hum any tune on the Billboard Hot 100.

Don't ask us what it's like in that moment when the body skitters away from that stupid sheepy shape of breath. Down here, no one asks. We all died boot to throat. We all went out shrieking some bloody name. ~Danielle Pafunda, "The Dead Girls Speak in Unison

Once upon a time – for that is how all stories should begin – there was a boy who lost his mother.

Travel backward to a lost land heard of in childhood; find it to be incomprehensible, rich, strange; then discover it is the place from which you set out.

Nosotros decimos que para consolarnos por la pérdida del Paraíso Dios nos concedió sólo a nosotros entre todas sus criaturas Esperanza y Memoria. Mejor dijéramos: Sólo porque somos criaturas cargadas con Esperanza y Memoria alentamos la ilusión de un Paraíso que nosotros y solamente nosotros hemos perdido.

Stories inside, each one nested within all the others; as though all the stories we had ever been inside of lay still nested inside of us, back to the beginning, whenever that is or was. Stories are what the history not made of time is made of. Funny

Aristotle says clearly, and St. Thomas follows him, that corporeal similitudes excite the memory more easily than the naked notions themselves.

When you return home, you'll tell the story of how you sought it and failed, and that story will be told and told again. And when you're dead yourself, the story will go on being told, and in that telling you'll speak and act and be alive again.

There are things in your past, preserved in memory almost by chance, that only later on, because of the course your own life takes, come to seem proleptic, or significant, or fascinating, when other things don't.

Non, elles savent ce qu'est la mort, elles se lamentent, mais, pour elles, les défunts ne sont plus là ; ils ne sont nulle part — dans une oubliette du cÅ"ur, dans la mémoire voire dans une histoire, mais ce ne sont plus des présences auxquelles on peut parler, auxquelles apporter ou demander du réconfort. Ce ne sont pas des morts à aimer ou à craindre.

it is a Tale. Only it's longer and stranger than we imagine. Longer and stranger than we can imagine. So what you must do—" she opened her eyes "—what you must do, and what I must do, is forget.

We're made of stories now, brother. It's why we never die even if we do.

We're made of stories now brother. Its why we don't die even when we do.

She slipped from her tall chair (why don't we remember living in a world where everything was absurdly outsize, tables and chairs and spoons, door knobs too high to reach, too fat to grasp?) and went to look.

I used to think, in Belaire, that maybe you had gone to live with the List, and it hadn't suited you, and that one spring they'd bring you home dead. From homesickness. I saw how you would look, pale and sad." "I did die," she said. "It was easy.

Already he found himself forgetting that something like an occluded front seemed to have swept over his memories of Sylvie, which he had thought as hard and changeless as anything he owned, but which when he touched them now seemed to have turned to autumn leaves like fairy gold, turned to wet earth, staghorn, snails' shells, fauns' feet.

My grandmother's is the world that dropped the bomb—itself a slick object—so elegantly smooth it managed to slip past American consciousness, past enemy lines.

Perhaps love is like a resting place, a shelter from the storm. It exists to give you comfort, it is there to keep you warm, and in those times of trouble when you are most alone, the memory of love will bring you home.