Quotes About Memory

She might have forgotten names and faces and people and events, but she hadn't forgotten emotions.

Smells could bring a person back clearer than pictures even could.

She remembered the feel of wind on summer nights - how it billows through the house and wafts the curtains and smells of tar and roses

Past is past... no it's not! People are always fond of saying that, but what's past is never past; not entirely.

Abby had a little trick that she used any time Red acted like a cranky old codger. She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him.

Reading is the first to go, my mother used to say, meaning that it was a luxury the brain dispensed with under duress. She claimed that after my father died she never again picked up anything more demanding than the morning paper. At the time I had thought that was sort of melodramatic of her, but now I found myself reading the same paragraph six times over, and I still couldn't have told you what it was about.

those who forget the past tend to regret the future

Morris. Mercy filed the name in her memory. So many unexpected people seemed to edge into a person's life, once that person had children.

Like most youngest children, he had trouble remembering his own past. The older ones did it so well for him, why should he bother? They had built him a second-hand memory that included the years before he existed, even. He had a distinct memory of Melissa's running away from home with a peanut sandwich and a pomegranate, two years before he was born; but he himself, with his locust on a leash, had vanished.

Oh, sounds were what brought the past alive most clearly!

What nobody understood about David, with the possible exception of Greta, was that he had suffered a very serious loss in his life. Two losses, in fact. Two very dear children: Emily and Nicholas. It was true that these days there happened to be two very dear grown-ups who were also named Emily and Nicholas, but they weren't the same people. It was just as if those children had died. He'd been in mourning ever since.

And time... Well you know about time. How slow it is when you're little and how it speeds up faster and faster once you're grown. Well now it's just a blur. I can't keep track of it anymore! But it's like time is sort of balanced. We're young for such a small fraction of our lives, and yet our youth seems to stretch on forever. Then we're old for years and years, but time flies by fastest then. So it all comes out equal in the end don't you see.

She would have made a better mother, perhaps, if she hadn't remembered so well how it felt to be a child.

Except for an occassional Sunday, they don't make days like they used to. I mean they don't make them whole anymore..........Days seem to come in pieces now. They used to be in blocks-all one solid color to them.

It all happened so fast, she thought, even though it had seemed endless at the time.

a car that wasn't familiar to her.

There were no captions. Once the subjects' identities must have seemed so obvious; it hadn't occurred to the album's creator that the time would come when no one alive remembered them.

She remembered the feel of wind on summer nights - how it billows through the house and wafts the curtains and smells of tar and roses. How a sleeping baby weighs so heavily on your shoulder, like ripe fruit. What privacy it is to walk in the rain beneath the drip and crackle of your own umbrella.

the past is never dead. It's not even past.

Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.

I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories.

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean....I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you couldn't find, among the files of clothing labels and heaps of rocks, among the swarms of protozoans and shelves of novels, whole tapes and snarls and reels of Bible.