Quotes About Memory

What is it about the past? I can never understand it. Why is it so powerful? Why does it appeal to us as if it had some extraordinary pearl of meaning that we can't find in our present lives?

I was thinking of Anna. I make myself think of her, I do it as an exercise. She is lodged in me like a knife and yet I am beginning to forget her. Already the image of her that I hold in my head is fraying, bits of pigments, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off. Will the entire canvas be empty one day?

Guilt is the only affect I know of that does not diminish with time.

Nh?ng t?t c? nh?ng gì b? chi?n tranh nghi?n nát thì d? âm l?i b?n lâu, b?n lâu h?n t?t c? các tàn tích c?a chi?n tranh và chinh bi?n.

He wanted to etch into his heart these memories, and wondered how he could have forgotten this tragedy for so many years.

Under the ground in the grave human beings aren't the same. You can look at each other, understand each other, but you can't do anything for each other." "If we found a way to tell them news of a victory, would they be happier?" Kien asked. "Come on! Even if we could, what would be the point? People in hell don't give a damn about wars. They don't remember killing. Killing is a career for the living, not the dead.

The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power--and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition. But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.

As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God, I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golden light that seemed to embrace me as surely as my mother's arms.

A kiss—to you a little thing! Yet I heard the angels sing. The stars all fell from out the sky, We cannot forget—my heart and I!

Everywhere in the house there were sad little reminders—a limp string shopping-bag hanging from the kitchen door; a fortune-telling book in the dresser-drawer; a fern in the dining-room window that had died from neglect since she had ceased to tend it; and one small black glove mixed up with the string she used to save—little things like that were everywhere.

A person couldn't wipe out the memories that shaped her being. She was a blend of past, present, and future.

Memory is life experience. When we deny it, there's a hole where it should

Recalling "Love Games," she returned to the present with a jolt and glanced at the set in time to find the show over for the day. She'd missed it!

When we lose someone we love, we can either die with them or live on to celebrate their life.

Every memory is real, but not all are based on fact. Time, forgetfulness, emotional need—any of these things can chip away at memory.

What if the past won't stay packed away in a box with my name on it, just sitting there until I feel like taking if off the shelf and lifting the lid?

The sky sinks slowly inside the past.

The worst thing about knowing that Gary Fairchild had been dead for a month was seeing him every day at work.

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

It's surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul.

as their tongues met, Will knew he'd made a serious mistake. Fifteen years hadn't been enough to make him forget, and now, he had nowhere to run.

Like this cemetery, she was old and dry and what she had once been or even later represented had begun to slip from memory.

Sometimes the trail you leave behind you is more important than the path ahead of you.