Quotes About Memory

It is a sentimental error ... to believe that the past is dead.

An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him.

Jim grieved for these American pilots, who died in a tangle of their harnesses, within sight of a Japanese corporal with a Mauser and a single English boy hidden on the balcony of this ruined building. Yet their end reminded Jim of his own, about which he had thought in a clandestine way ever since his arrival at Lunghua.

Hope has a good memory, gratitude a bad one.

The things we remember best are those better forgotten.

A long future requires a long past.

Glory is the sun of the dead.

She was still there inside me now, just as she always was: a life put on hold, a memory I didn't know how to handle.

Time expands and contracts. When it expands, it's like pitch: it folds people in its arms and holds them forever in its embrace. It doesn't let us go so easily. Sometimes you go back again to the place you've just come from, stop and close your eyes, and realize that not a second has passed, and time just leaves you there, stranded, in the darkness

In places where a loved one has died, time stops for eternity. If I stand on the very spot, one says to oneself, like a prayer, might I feel the pain he felt? They say that on a visit to an old castle or whatever, the history of the place, the presence of people who walked there many years ago, can be felt in the body. Before, when I heard things like that, I would think, what are they talking about? But i felt I understood it now.

In places where a loved one has died, time stops for eternity.

When my grandmother died, time died, too, in this apartment.

I have these two different images of her etched into my memory: one as this idealized mother, and the other as a sort of pressure weighing down on me - obsessive, feminine love.

Parting and death are both terribly painful. But to keep nursing the memory of a love so great you can't believe you'll ever love again is a useless drain on a woman's energies.

Als ich sehe, wie Harus Haar verspielt im Wind tanzt und völlig zerzaust wird, und das, obwohl das Grau da draußen doch bleischwer in der Luft lastet, erkenne ich auf einmal, wie weit, weit weg die Vergangenheit ist. Weiter als der Tod, ja weiter sogar als die unüberbrückbare Distanz, die zwischen zwei Menschen besteht.

Al recordar su sonrisa, no sé por qué, me duele el corazón.

Parting and death are both terribly painful. But to keep nursing the memory of a love so great you can't believe you'll ever love again is a useless drain on a woman's energies.

Sul campo di battaglia della memoria giacevano le spoglie di tutto quanto si era piegato a forze invisibili, dei pensieri di ciò che era svanito lasciando soltanto le emozioni dietro di sè. L'avrei attraversato giorno dopo giorno, imprimendo le orme dei miei passi come si offrono fiori.

That resplendent space created by a piece of fiction can really expand the width of time... Clearly there is a spot somewhere inside our heads they records that feelings we had when we read the book, and it stays with us forever.

Nothing could take away the sights that my eyes had seen, that my mind remembered, or that I lived in the very cells that made up my body. Take that, time, I thought, and squeezed my hand into a fist.

May the memory of this moment, here, the glowing impression of the two of us facing each other in this warm, bright place, drinking lovely hot tea, help save him, even a little bit.

D'un tratto capii quanto fosse lontano il passato. Anche più della morte, anche più della distanza incolmabile tra persona e persona.

Of that day in which everything was just too beautiful in the transparent winter air, what I remember most is the sight, when I turned back to look, of Hitoshi's black jacket melting into the darkness.