Quotes About Memory

My mother, who died aged 82, had Alzheimer's. Losing your memory is bad enough, but everything shuts down. You can't remember how to eat or go to the toilet. It's a terrible disease and so distressing to watch it take over someone you love.

My parents were born in the 1930s, and they experienced the air raids on Tokyo.

Every story takes its toll on me and leaves an impression on me.

All love stories beget ghost stories.

How quickly the world plows us under, she thought with a pang. For two generations, maybe three, we lived on. After that, we're nothing more than a name, or—her eye fell on one of Great-Aunt Minerva's chairs standing like a sentry against the wall—a part of the furniture.

The things that remain matter. Because of them, I can render a plausible life.

What if a place could remember what had happened? What if a place could speak? What if that memory tripped us up in our daily lives?

Wars, plagues, names upon tombs tell us only what happened. But history lies in the cracks between

The loss of cultural memory is a kind of death, for culture is sustained by memory. We do not have to accept others' narrow understanding of our meanings.

On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.'12 It was in an essay

All I'd ever wanted was to forget. but even when I thought I had, pieces had kept emerging, like bits of wood floating up to the surface that only hint at the shipwreck below.

Some things don't last forever, but some things do. Like a good song, or a good book, or a good memory you can take out and unfold in your darkest times, pressing down on the corners and peering in close, hoping you still recognize the person you see there.

That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again, that shocking.

Some things don't last forever, but some things do. Like a good song, or a good book, or a good memory you can take out and unfold in your darkest times, pressing down on the corners and peering in close, hoping you still recognize the person you see there.

Music is a total constant. That's why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in your or the world, that one song says the same, just like that moment.

Some people, they can't just move on, you know, mourn and cry and be done with it. Or at least seem to be. But for me... I don't know. I didn't want to fix it, to forget. It wasn't something that was broken. It's just...something that happened. And like that hole, I'm just finding ways, every day, of working around it. Respecting and remembering and getting on at the same time.

I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its undercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin when we are barely old enough to stand upright. I have no memory of finding it hard. Indeed, I have no memory of it at all.

I remember when I came home from the hospital after having my son, I wore a Narciso Rodriguez black coat. Then, I was using this fragrance that I had created. I walk by that coat, and it still smells like that fragrance. It takes you right there.

He's following me... He needs to have a secret but he can´t help telling the heat is going out of me. The heart is going out of me, and though she cannot remember she cannot forget. Clutching a fistful of sand. What ties me to you is guilt. I crossed two rivers and wept by one I am the beast at the end of the rope Happy and free.

At home I'm clean. Like it never happened. Tell them you saw me. Tell them...you saw me.

Theatre has no memory, which makes it the most existential of the arts... I keep coming back in the hope that someone in a darkened room somewhere will show me an image that burns itself into my mind

I believe in anniversaries, that a mood can be repeated even if the event that caused it is trivial or forgotten. In this case, it's neither.

You fill my head as only someone who is absent can.

I am an emotional plagiarist, stealing other people's pain, subsuming it into my own until I can't remember whose it is any more.