Quotes About Memory

Remembering backward is the easy thing. If you could remember forward, you could save yourself…

Her favorite foods made her gag, like old friends she hadn't seen in years turning up looking all wrong.

Living's immediacy, you go full sail, you're in a fever of motion. Until it's safe and past and done and dead and you can say, like waking from a dream, Yes I was happy then, yes now it's all over I can see I was happy then. Maybe that's the advantage of dying?

She could not testify against Zachary Lundt for she could not recall with any degree of accuracy, the sequence of events of the early hours of Sunday February 14, nor even herself during that time. It was like a movie where something has gone wrong with the film, images continue to flutter past, but dim, confused, out of focus.

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite has passed, and is irretrievable.

No se puede ejercer la memoria hasta que uno se ha retirado de la fuente del recuerdo.

For Iris has learned that to experience a thing is not to know it, or even to have the power to remember it coherently.

you've glanced at me, and through me, dear Dr. K——, upon more than one recent occasion, no more recognizing your Angel than you would have recognized a plate heaped with food you'd devoured twenty-three years ago with a zestful appetite

Yet I remember little. Or nothing. A chloroformed handkerchief, perhaps; a stinging & burning sensation afterward, when required to make water—(as Nanny called it); ah, is it not distasteful, ugly—& too trifling to be recalled.)

It was a time of sin. It was not a time of innocence. It was a time of physical disgust. For I remember well.

fear in her eyes that were a damp blurred blue Patrick would afterward recall

The proposition is: Flesh has memory. The proposition is: Flesh has memory but is perpetually innocent. Even in ripening, even in rot.

Extraño: que cuando una luz se apaga, inmediatamente después es como si nunca hubiera existido. La oscuridad lo llena todo de nuevo, por completo.

La memoria a veces resulta confusa, esa es la cuestión. Si la memoria no fuera confusa no poseerías el valor del necio de repetir una y otra vez cosas que te destrozan.

That is a blessing of bad dreams, they are quickly forgotten.

young girl Revere had brought home

At the LaPortes' she'd bathed twice. The first time at about 4:30 AM, which she couldn't remember very clearly and the second time at 9:30 A.M. and Trisha had still been asleep in her bed or pretending to be asleep. The gentle tick-ticking of a bedside clock. Hours of that clock, hours unmoving beneath the covers of a bed not her own in a house not her own.

Dorcas wasn't a fast walker. It was difficult for me to keep behind her. I tried to let others, joggers, and bicyclists, come between us. I followed her past a field where girls were playing soccer, and into the woods bordering Catamount Creek. The smell of pine needles underfoot was sharp, pungent. I seemed to know that I would always associate that smell with this afternoon, and with Dorcas.

Like a memory of having been poisoned by something you'd eaten, barely managed to survive—and yet here is the food again, and you are hungry.

She had never been drunk before, but believed that that was what had happened to her. She'd been drinking something made of orange juice and she'd been warned, but had not listened or could not remember having listened, and could not remember who'd warned her. She did not wish to name any names and to involve her friends or anyone for no one was to blame except possibly herself.

And he'd died because that life had mattered to him.

They said, Tell us. She said, Only what I know. They said, Tell us, so that justice can be executed. She said, I was drinking. I was to blame. I don't remember. How can I give testimony against him!

You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source.

To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius.