Quotes About Memory

It is one kind of trouble to kiss your fiancé good-bye in the morning and immediately turn your thoughts to another man. But it's another kind altogether if the other man has been dead for nine decades, or is of the genus Sciurus.

I didn't want it to be one good memory that led to a lot of bad ones. I wanted it to stay what it was, one amazing moment, something that was strong and sweet enough to stand on its own. Something I could remember without any pain. - Kate

She became a story, one I have mostly forgotten. One I can't end because she died a long time ago.

Once upon a time, I did not live in Shady Pines. Once upon a time, my name was not Alice. Once upon a time, I didn't know how lucky I was.

I wish it had never happened because then I wouldn't think about it as I'm falling asleep.

Whatever happened to me just now has gotten to me, broken past the fragile shell I've built. More than my memory is gone. My soul has wings that beat to a heart I don't understand and I see things, feel things that I know aren't from here, but that are so real.

How can I remember a world that isn't mine? One that isn't the one I wake up in every day now?

The memory of Mark Antony and his attempts to create a new eastern Hellenistic empire had not yet died. So sensitive was the situation under Augustus that the emperor prohibited independent visits to the new province by Roman senators and eminent knights.

And yet, standing behind her son, waiting for the traffic light change, she remembered how in the midst of it all there had been a time when she'd felt a loneliness so deep that once, not so many years ago, having a cavity filled, the dentist's gentle turning of her chin with his soft fingers had felt to her like a tender kindness of almost excruciating depth, and she had swallowed with a groan of longing, tears springing to her eyes.

The year that followed - was it the happiest year of his own life? He often thought so, even knowing that such a thing was foolish to claim about any year of one's life: but in his memory, that particular year held the sweetness of a time that contained no thoughts of a beginning and no thoughts of an end..

What puzzled Abel about life was how much one forgot but then lived with anyway—like phantom limbs, he supposed.

Silly little plastic belt, made for a skinny pinny; it could barely tie around her. She managed, though - a tiny white bow. Waiting, she folded her hands and realized how every single time she went by this hospital, the same two thoughts occurred to her: that she'd been born here and that her father's body had been brought here after his suicide. She'd been through some things, but never mind. She straightened her back. Other people had been through things, too.

there's not one goddamn person in this world who doesn't have a bad memory or two to take with them through life.

I never wrote him. I never saw him again. He was just gone, this dear, dear man, this friend of my soul in the hospital so long ago, disappeared. This is a New York story too.

Here is the thing that Cindy, for the rest of her life, would never forget: Olive Kitteridge said, "My God, but I have always loved the light in February." Olive shook her head slowly. "My God," she repeated, with awe in her voice. "Just look at that February light.

I like these experts because they seem decent, and because I feel I know a true sentence when I hear one now. They do not know what my mother remembered. I don't know what my mother remembered either.

An ache stayed inside her. And a faint reverberating hum of something close to joy lived on the outer edges of her memory, some kind of longing that had been answered once and was simply not answered anymore.

I know faintly, even now, that I have embarrassed myself, and it always comes back to the feeling of childhood, that huge pieces of knowledge about the world were missing that can never be replaced.

And so the day they had had together folded over on itself, was done with, gone. —

but it was the doctor's body, the sudden way he moved the folders on his desk, the way he moved back from Harmon, that Harmon would always remember. As though he had known what Harmon didn't know, that lives get knit together like bones, and fractures might not heal.

Dottie was not a woman to complain, having been taught by her decent Aunt Edna one summer—it seemed like a hundred years ago, and practically was—that a complaining woman was like pushing dirt beneath the fingernails of God, and this was an image Dottie had never been able to fully dislodge.

say—every morning he said this—"Lucy B, Lucy B, how did we meet? I thank God we

William's life rumbled over, like a train on loose tracks: the images from Dachau that would not leave his brain after he had gone there with me so many years ago. He had been petrified by what he saw there in Germany. He must have been

Spense la sigaretta nel portacenere. Non si sarebbe messa a lamentarsi, non era più una bambina. Ma le restava dentro un dolore. E un suono continuo e sommesso, il debole riverbero qualcosa di simile alla gioia, continuava a vivere ai margini della sua memoria, una qualche specie di desiderio che un tempo aveva trovato risposta e ora, semplicemente, non più.