Quotes About Memory

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

But who can remember pain, once its 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.

But there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like that can't quite remember who they are.

I remember Queen Victoria's advice to her daughter. Close your eyes and think of England.

I've forgotten about these things all winter, but here they are again, and when I see them I remember them, I know them, I greet them as if they are home.

My own hair reposes in a cardboard box in a steamer trunk in my mother's cellar, where I picture it becoming duller and more brittle with each passing year, and possibly moth-eaten; by now it will look like the faced wreaths of hair in Victorian funeral jewelry. Or it may have developed a dry mildew; inside its tissue-paper wrappings it glows faintly, in the darkness of the trunk.

I don't want to remember. The past has become discontinuous, like stones skipped across water, like postcards: I catch an image of myself, a dark blank, an image, a blank.

I try to remember if the past was exactly like this. I'm not sure, now. I know it contained these things, but somehow the mix is different. A movie about the past is not the same as the past.

The bathrobe was magenta, a colour that still makes him anxious whenever he sees it.

I watched your snapshot fade for twenty years.

WITHOUT MEMORY, there is no debt. Put another way: without story, there is no debt.

But her mind can't hold him, she can't fix the memory of what he looks like. It's as if a breeze blows over the water and he's dispersed, into broken colours, into ripples; then he reforms elsewhere, past the nest pillar, taking on his familiar body.

After we're gone the work of our knives will survive us.

of course you'll die but not yet, you'll outlive even my distortions of you

Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions.

It's her second baby, she had another child, once, I know that from the Center, when she used to cry about it at night, like the rest of us only more noisily. So she ought to be able to remember this, what it's like, what's coming. 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.

I will bend, I will touch the ground, or as close to it as I can get without rupture. I will lay a wreath of invisible money on her grave.

They should all be cheered by it, for isn't it what they want? What we all want: to leave a message behind us that has an effect, if only a dire one: a message that cannot be cancelled out.

She was something of his own that he had lost.

He'd forgotten what delight felt like.

I always remembered what she looked like, the dried apple face, the silvery gray hair, the snapping blue eyes.

Their mother died early, and not in a good way. Not that anyone dies in a good way, Tin footnotes to himself, but there are degrees. Being hit by a truck after closing time while jaywalking blinded with mournful tears was not a good way. Though it was quick.

Then I remembered something I'd seen and hadn't noticed, at the time. It wasn't the army. It was some other army.

That was the trouble with Blood and Roses: it was easier to remember the Blood stuff. The other trouble was that the Blood player usually won, but winning meant you inherited a wasteland.