Quotes About Memory

All those years I'd kept an outline of my father in my head, like a chalk line enclosing a father-shaped space. When I was little, I'd coloured it in often enough. But those colours had been too bright and the outline had been too large...

I'd wanted to leave home, but have it stay in place, waiting for me, unchanged, so I could step back into it at will.

He had been with me, but he wasn't with me now, we had been walking along a street like this one and then the future swept over us and we were separated. He was in the distance now, across the ocean, on a beach, the wind ruffling his hair, I could hardly see his features. He was moving at an ever-increasing speed away from me, into the land of the dead, the dead past, irretrievable.

We can't remember what it is that we've forgotten. That we have been made to forget.

An odd thing souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now.

I remember a television program I once saw; a rerun, made years before. I must have been seven or eight, too young to understand it. It was the sort of thing my mother liked to watch: historical, educational. She tried to explain it to me afterwards, to tell me that the things in it had really happened, but to me it was only a story. I thought someone had made it up. I suppose all children think that, about any history before their own. If it's only a story, it becomes less frightening.

Pero quién puede recordar el dolor, una vez que éste ha desaparecido? Todo lo que queda de él es una sombra, ni siquiera en la mente ni en la carne. El dolor deja una marca demasiado profunda como para que se vea, una marca que queda fuera del alcance de la vista y de la mente.

I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except

you can't change the past, Aunt Lou used to say. Oh, but I wanted to; that was the one thing I really wanted to do

You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You don't know yet about the habit they have, of coming back.

Death is a beautiful woman, with wings and one breast almost bare; or is that Victory? I can't remember. They

But who can remember pain, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

at this distance you're a mirage, a glossy image fixed in the posture of the last time I saw you. Turn you over, there's a place for the address. Wish you were here.

Hang on to the words, he tells himself. The odd words, the old words, the rare ones. Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don't really believe you're there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.

But sometimes I see instead the young girl's face I once spent so much time rearranging and deploring, drowned and floating just beneath my present face

In restaurants we argue over which of us will pay for your funeral / though the real question is whether or not I will make you immortal.

A movie about the past is not the same as the past.

It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he's lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he's forgotten so much, what have I forgotten?

Every war is the war for whoever's lived through it.

The collective memory is notoriously faulty, and much of the past sinks into the ocean of time to be drowned forever; but once in a while the waters part, allowing us to glimpse a flash of hidden treasure, if only for a moment.

That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done;

I'd wanted to leave home, but have it stay in place, waiting for me, unchanged, so I could step back into it at will.

quién puede recordar el dolor una vez que éste ha desaparecido? Todo lo que queda de él es una sombra, ni siquiera en la mente o en la carne. El dolor deja una marca demasiado profunda para que se vea, una marca que queda fuera del alcance de la vista y de la mente.