Quotes About Memory

Joshie had always told Post-Human Services staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were, because every moment our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each day we transform into a different person, an utterly unfaithful iteration of our original selves, of the drooling kid in the sandbox.

On that night I was left with only the truth that nothing of our personality survives after death, that in the end all that was Misha Vainberg would evaporate along with the styles and delusions of his epoch, leaving behind not one flutter of his sad heavy brilliance, not one damp spot around which his successors could congregate to appreciate his life and times.

Easter would be coming soon, but her mother was still dead.

He worried that when he would speak of the past, he would sound and look old, as all ancient storytelling men did.

The nesting doll of memory collapses into its component pieces, each leading someplace smaller and smaller [...]

What has been done, thought, written, or spoken is not culture; culture is only that fraction which is remembered.

In the theater of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant roles . . . . And if we want to go beyond history, or even, while remaining in history, detach from our own history the always too contingent history of the persons who have encumbered it, we realize that the calendars of our lives can only be established in its imagery.

A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.

Knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing.

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

De um modo geral, os 'fatos' não explicam os 'valores'. Bas obras de imaginação poética, os valores têm tal signo de novidade que tudo o que deriva do passado é inerte com relação a eles. Toda memória precisa ser reimaginada. Temos na memória microfilmes que só podem ser lidos quando recebem a luz viva da imaginação.

She was closed up like a fist. It her very own memory, not theirs, her very own real and terrible and lonely and dark memory.

It was as if she had more than learned it off by heart. Though. it was as if their memory, the memory of all the Corregidora women, was her memory too, as strong with her as her own private memory, or almost as strong. But now she was Mama again.

There is one strange irony that I haven't told you. One April afternoon, three weeks before she died, Gilda walked up to me in our living room and said, "I have a title for you, 'Kiss Me Like a Stranger' . . . maybe you can use it some day." I had no idea why she said it or what the title meant; I just thanked her.

It may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual.

And it came to me that these trees had been hardly smaller when I was yet unborn, and had stood as they stood now when I was a child playing among the cypresses and peaceful tombs of our necropolis, and that they would stand yet, drinking in the last light of the dying sun, even as now, when I had been dead as long as those who rested there.

Consciousness came and went. Consciousness went and came like the errant winds of spring, and I, who so often have had difficulty in falling asleep among the besieging shades of memory, now fought to stay awake as a child struggles to lift a faltering kite by the string.

There is no category of human activity in which the dead do not outnumber the living many times over. Most beautiful children are dead. Most soldiers, most cowards. The fairest women and the most learned men—all are dead.

Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.

Lois had gone out of my life (I should say that she had left my future—I could never eradicate her from my past, no matter how hard I tried)

our lives couldn't be viewed with detachment until they were half forgotten, like paintings which can be seen objectively only when the artists are long dead

How big is a man's life? asked Ultan. I have no way of knowing, but isn't it larger than that? You see it from the beginning, and anticipate much. I, recollecting it from its termination, know how little there has been. I suppose that is why the depraved creatures who devour the bodies of the dead seek more.

A young man seeks a woman and finds her and is great and dies to the world. Afterward he is never as great again, but the woman is a comfort to him, reminding him of the time that was, and he is a little again with her what once he was wholly.