Quotes About Memory

A rose smells the same to me now as it did when I was twenty. Ah, but do I smell the same to the rose?

The war had jerked me out of the old life I'd known, but in the queer period that came afterwards I forgot it almost completely.

It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in The present, now existed in The past, and when once The act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentical- ly, and upon The same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.

Alguns anos antes-quantos?-devia fazer uns sete anos-ele sonhara que estava andando em um aposento completamente às escuras. E alguém sentado a um lado disse,quando ele passou:Ainda nos encontraremos no lugar onde não há escuridão. Isso foi dito com muita tranquilidade, de forma quase despreocupada-era uma afirmação, não era uma ordem.

One thing, I thought as I drove down the hill, I'm finished with this notion of getting back into the past. What's the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don't exist. Coming up for air! But there isn't any air. The dustbin that we're in reaches up to the stratosphere.

It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say.

A few animals still felt faintly doubtful, but Squealer asked them shrewdly, 'Are you certain that this is not something that you have dreamed, comrades? Have you any record of such a resolution? Is it written down anywhere?' And since it was certainly true that nothing of the kind existed in writing, the animals were satisfied that they had been mistaken.

Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?' 'No.' 'Then where does the past exist, if at all?

Whoever writes about his childhood must beware of exaggeration and self-pity. I do not want to claim that I was a martyr or that Crossgates was a sort of Dotheboys Hall. But I should be falsifying my own memories if I did not record that they are largely memories of disgust.

Pourquoi avait-il du mal à supporter la vie actuelle, si ce n'est qu'il y avait une sorte de souvenir ancestral d'une époque où tout était différent ?

He had dragged out from the corners of his memory some more fragments of forgotten rhymes.

Was the Party's hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer 'had once' existed?

she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return

Sometimes, indeed, you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence. Just once in his whole life he had held in his hands unmistakable documentary proof of the falsification of an historical fact.

El camarada Ogilvy, que nunca había existido en el presente, existía ahora en el pasado

then the lie passed into history and became truth.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In

Ä°nsan, kendi belleÄŸi d???nda hiçbir kay?t olmay?nca en belirgin gerçeÄŸi bile nas?l kan?tlayabilirdi ki?

toiled day in, day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. There was a certain fitness in this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple of years earlier.

It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory.

Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories.

He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.

El recuerdo de su madre le torturaba porque había muerto amándole cuando él era demasiado joven y egoísta para devolverle ese cariño y porque de alguna manera — no recordaba cómo— se había sacrificado a un concepto de la lealtad que era privatísimo e inalterable.

By the end he was living in each chapter of his life simultaneously—Kennedy and Obama, Vietnam and Bosnia and Afghanistan—as if he were floating in a single body of water whose temperature varied from place to place and depth to depth. All that accumulated experience—we Americans don't want it. We're almost embarrassed by it, except when we're burying it.