Quotes About Memory

One day you'll remember this moment, and it'll mean something very different. Maybe you'll cringe and laugh, or brim with pride, aching to return. Or notice some detail hidden in the scene, a future landmark making its first appearance or discreetly taking its final bow.

Your life is a highlight reel: a gradual search for a handful of memories.

anemoia nostalgia for a time you never experienced.

waldosia n. a condition characterized by scanning faces in a crowd looking for a specific person who would have no reason to be there, which is your brain's way of checking to see whether they're still in your life, subconsciously patting its emotional pockets before it leaves for the day.

appriesse n. the feeling of loss that you never had the chance to meet a certain person before they died, which compels you to try to get to know them anyway, gathering snapshots and stories to build out a sketch of who they were, learning them like a character in a novel, which makes them feel all the more alive even though you've already skipped ahead and read the last page.

amentalio n. the sadness of realizing that you're already forgetting sense memories of the departed-already struggling to hear their voice, picture the exact shade of their eyes, or call to mind little gestures you once knew by heart.

backmasking n. the instinctive tendency to see someone as you knew them in their youth, a burned-in image of grass-stained knees, graffitied backpacks or handfuls of birthday cake superimposed on an adult with a degree, an illusion formed when someone opens the door to your emotional darkroom while the memory is still developing.

Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.

As memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape.

In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy. A cross-channel ferry, with its overfilled ashtrays and vomiting children, is as good a place as any to reflect on the angel who stands with a flaming sword in front of the gateway to all our yesterdays.

Despite the post-it note with her phone number on it, shes already little more than a fading memory. They all are.

Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East. And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead. And another man, who remains inside his own house, dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church, which he forgot.

Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.

In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.

entry from three years ago, gave her tag as WineBitch and

Scandinavia through the Viking Age was for all intents and purposes an oral society, one in which nearly all information was encoded in mortal memory—rather than in books that could be stored—and passed from one memory to another through speech acts.

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it. —Michel de Montaigne John Ling. Fallen Angel (Kindle Locations 31-32). Kia Kaha Press.

Thus the ideas, as well as children, of our youth, often die before us: and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching; where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away.

Perishability in a photograph is important in a picture. If a photograph looks perishable we say, "Gee, I'm glad I have that moment."

Lido sniffled and wiped his nose. "That'd be

Getting the past wrong is almost as problematic as not getting the past into our minds at all.

En la mente humana hay intelecto, memoria y voluntad, pero las tres son una. Y,

The world was quickly forgetting us. And there was little news to report.

Sometimes I got worried that my memory was falling apart.