Quotes About Memory

Why did happy memories fade and blur until one could scarcely recall them at all, while horrible memories seemed to retain their blinding clarity and painful sharpness?

I have always known that you will visit my grave. I see myself as a small brown bird, perhaps a sparrow, watching you from a low branch as you pray in front of my name. I will hear you sound out my epitaph: Aqui descansa una mujer que quiso volar. You will recall telling me that you once dreamed in Spanish, and felt the words lift you into flight. The sound of wings will startle you when you say volar, and you will understand.

She wondered if he would try to make love to her and if he did, whether she would let him. It was hard to refuse if someone really wanted to, She tried to remember how she had refused someone in the past and then realized that she couldn't remember because she had never actually done it.

It's all about remembering, it's all about being fifteen and in love for the first time.

This grandmother person looked Vix, Lewis, and Lanie up and down without moving her head. Then she said, "Well, Tawny, I can see you've been busy." And that was it. Tawny didn't cry when Darlene died the next day.

Goodbye, Daddy. I love you. I'll always love you. This doesn't mean that I'm not going to think about you anymore. This doesn't mean that I'm never going to think about that night, either. Because that night happened. And there's nothing I can do to change the facts. But from now on I'm going to remember the good times. From now on I'm going to remember you full of life and full of love.

Every generation relearns the rules its fathers have forgotten. One rule is awareness, the need to see past the power of human hands on the land, to the power beneath it. Those who forget have the wind to jog their memory, wind slipping evenly through the sage, dusting across the fields. Watch your back, it's whispering. This land owes you nothing.

I look in the mirror through the eyes of the child that was me.

There are no accidents in memory, for memory has its own reasons and its own logic. What I remember is what happened to me as I best recall it.

For songs are the heart of our memory and they let us live the search for meaning in our lives again and again.

Teri yaad chaand ki shakal mein ubhar kar aati hain

Our last impression of her as she turned the corner was that smile, flung backward like a handful of flowers.

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

You can't be close to the mortality of friends without being brought to think of your own.

A muddy little stream, a village grown unfamiliar with time and trees. I turn around and retrace my way up Main Street and park and have a Coke in the confectionery store. It is run by a Greek, as it used to be, but whether the same Greek or another I would not know. He does not recognize me, nor I him. Only the smell of his place is familiar, syrupy with old delights, as if the ghost of my first banana split had come close to breathe on me.

You are at once a lasting presence and an unhealed wound.

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention, and

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention...

It was the last nostalgia: that heShould understand.

Susanna's music touched the bawdy stringsOf those white elders; but, escaping,Left only Death's ironic scraping.Now, in its immortality, it playsOn the clear viol of her memory,And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill;

Consider the odd morphology of regret.

He thought often of the land from which he came, How that whole country was a melon, pink If seen rightly and yet a possible red.

We cannot look at the past or the future except by means of the imagination but again the imagination of backward glances is one thing and the imagination of looks ahead something else. Even the psychologists concede this present particular, for, with them, memory involves a reproductive power, and looks ahead involve a creative power: the power of our expectations.