Quotes About Memory

Yes, good, kind Crake. I will stop telling this story if you sing. Because it makes me forget what I am telling.

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh. And sometimes it happened, for a time. 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

I say her because I don't recall having been present, not in any meaningful sense of the word. I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all.

The night before I left on the sealed bullet train, I reread my old diary, and then I knew what the Gardeners meant when they said, Be careful what you write. There were my own words from the time when I was so happy, except that now it was torture to read them. I took the diary down the street and around the corner and shoved it into a garboil dumpster. It would turn into oil and then all those red hearts I'd drawn would go up in smoke, but at least they would be useful along the way.

Returning from the dead used to be something I did well I began asking why I began forgetting how

For so much time, our history was written in bones only.

so hard, sometimes, to tag those memories accurately.

Roz is telling a story. That's what they will do, increasingly in their lives: tell stories. Tonight their stories will be about Zenia.

They are entering the forest of amnesia, where things have lost their names.

Time passed. I gardened, I read, and so on. I had already begun—in a modest way, and beginning with a few pieces of animal jewellery from Richard—the trade in second-hand artifacts that, as it turned out, would stand me in good stead in the coming decades. A semblance of normality had been installed. But unshed tears can turn you rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep.

I've cut myself off. I can feel the place where I used o be attached. It's raw, as when you grate your finger. It's a shredded mess of images. It hurts. But where exactly on me is this torn-off stem? Now here, now there. Meanwhile the other girl, the one with the memory, is coming nearer and nearer. She's catching up to me, trailing behind her, like red smoke, the rope we share.

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

I have to be more careful about my memories, I have to be sure they're my own and not the memories of other people telling me what I felt, how I acted, what I said: if the events are wrong the feelings I remember about them will be wrong too, I'll start inventing them and there will be no way of correcting it, the ones who could help are gone.

Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait - Estienne; C'est de quoi j'ai le plus de peur que la peur - Montaigne; (...) L'histoire, cette vieille dame exaltée et menteuse - de Maupassant.

I knew his hug was acting, but at that moment I didn't care. I really did feel almost as if he was my first boyfriend. It wasn't much, but it was something.

The brain is very protective, it decides what we choose to remember.

I collected enough fragments of the past to make a reconstruction of it, which must have borne as much relation to the real thing as a mosaic portrait would to the original.

Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic. Ivory

The next few weeks were the worst he could remember. Too many things were coming back to him, too much of what he'd lost - or - sadder - had never had in the first place. All that wasted time, and he didn't even know who'd wasted it.

Melanie told me that all the early pictures of me had been burnt up in a fire. Only an idiot would have believed this, so I did.

So instead she's sitting remembering how much she can no longer remember, of who she used to be, who she thought she would turn into when she grew up.

A scar is like writing on your body. It tells about something that once happened to you, such as a cut on your skin where blood came out. What

What I miss is what she'd say. What she would have said.