Quotes About Memory

Memories are strange things. Without being something I can hold in my hand, they wield a beguiling power over me. Like a mirage in the noontime heat of summer they dance before my inner eyes and beckon me to find water where there is no water.

Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as the past is lost, or is it enough to know yes we lived then, and we are living now, and the connection must be there? Like a river hundreds of miles long exists both at its source and at its mouth, simultaneously?

You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.

But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another's faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn't happen.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again that tear you apart.

Because we are linked by blood and blood is memory without language.

In that way you recall, suddenly, sharply, in daylight, a trace of a dream of the previous night--but even as you recall it, it begins to fade.

Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.

It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices, You will not forget me -- will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.

Great handfuls of her life were being stolen from her and she would never be able to retrieve them.

Thinking of such things like they'd happened years ago already and not just a few weeks back. For once life begins to accelerate it goes faster and faster.

If I could open a vein. Not to inject any shit, I will never weaken like that again, but just to feel the kick of it, the old memory. So this numbness lifts. So I could get back there easier.

Laughter too depends upon memory—a memory of previous laughter. Dr.

For the widow inhabits a tale not of her own telling.

Why is it when I'm inside this stone house I've come to love I can't remember what it looks like from the outside. And when I'm outside I can't remember what it looks like on the inside. Why is it I keep losing my way. The things in the back room taunting me. The views from the windows don't seem to mesh somehow.

Unfamiliar places could be more dangerous than familiar places, unexpectedly. The boy had been discovering that an unfamiliar place was more easily "haunted" than a familiar place simply because there was less there to distract the memory.

NO KISS FORGOTTEN; it resides in the memory as in the flesh, and so Katya many times felt the press of Marcus Kidder's warm mouth on hers in the days and especially in the nights following. And her heartbeat quickened in protest: How could you! Kiss him! That old man! Kiss him! Let him put his arms around you ad kiss you and kiss him back! The old man's mouth and Katya Spivak's mouth! How could you.

It may be that actual tears have stained the tile floors or soaked into the carpets of such places. It may be that these tears can never be removed. And everywhere the odor of melancholy, that is the very odor of memory.

Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without blundering into the memory pools of strangers—their dread of what was imminent in their lives, their false hopes, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudden terrible and irrefutable knowledge; you would not wish to hear echoes of their whispered exchanges—But he was looking so well yesterday, what has happened to him overnight—

She will speculate that she didn't fully know her husband—this will give her leverage to seek him, to come to know him. It will keep her husband "alive" in her memory—elusive, teasing.

Love you in that cheerleader's costume. Last Friday. You didn't see me I guess. But I was there.