Quotes About Memory

The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened.

The tombstones smashed in Hebrew cemeteries and plundered for Polish sidewalks; today bored citizens, staring at their feet while waiting for a bus, can still read the inscriptions.

We made our paints from the bones of the animals we painted. No image forgets this origin.

In our family, an experience was not finished, not truly experienced, unless written down...

The capacity to love does not die when the lover dies.

How quickly a moment sinks into the past.

Time was a peculiarly elastic measurement. It was an empty space, given meaning only by what it contained, and afterwards distorted in memory.

At about twenty she had mentioned it quite seriously at the dinner table. It was the only occasion she could recall of every member of her family laughing at once.

he had no memory of ever having loved, let alone to such cost, and yet he knew without question that to care for any person or issue enough to sacrifice greatly for it was the surest sign of being wholly alive.

She flushed hot to remember how utterly she had given herself to him in that one consuming kiss. All her heart and mind and will had been in it, all the things she could never ever have said to him.

To lose someone you love because they die is a sweet ache. To lose everything good you believed of them is a pain that stains all they left behind. It poisons the very air of memory. Ballinger

Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.

My last sunrise. That morning, I was not yet a vampire. And I saw my last sunrise. I remember it completely; yet I do not think I remember any other sunrise before it.

It was haunted; but real hauntings have nothing to do with ghosts finally; they have to do with the menace of memory.

That morning I was not yet a vampire, and I saw my last sunrise. I remember it completely, and yet I can't recall any sunrise before it. I watched its whole magnificence for the last time as if it were the first. And then I said farewell to sun light, and set out to become what I became.

Without memory there can be no insight. Without love, there can be no appreciation.

what was the good of being a movie werewolf? You howled at the moon; you couldn't remember what you did, and then somebody shot you.

I'd drink your blood if I could and hook you into every memory inside me, every heartbreak, frame of reference, temporary triumph, petty defeat, mystic moment of surrender.

I didn't tell her what it had been like, those few days. But I think she knew. Something magical had been lost utterly.

Dig deep, deep, my soul, to find the heart--the blood, the heat, the shrine and resting place. Dig deep, deep into the moist soil all the way to where they lie, those I love--she, Mother, with her dark hair loose and gone, her bones long since tumbled in the back of the vault, as other coffins came to rest in her spot, but in this dream I range them round me to hold as if she were there...

We live forever; but they don't come back.

memory is desperate to leave us. Memory knows that we cannot endure its company. Memory would reduce us to fools.

He seemed even younger now, as though he were traveling backwards in time, in his mind, or merely becoming innocent, as if the dead, if they are going to stick around, have a right to remember their innocence.

I want to remember these nights always, she thought. I want to fix them forever in my memory. I want to lose nothing. When it's done, when it's decided and it's over, I will write a memoir seeking to capture everything forever. When it's happening it is too beautiful, too overwhelming, and you can feel it's being lost with every breath you take.