Quotes About Memory

Of course I loved you, you saved my life. I wish you hadn't I wish you hadn't I wish you'd left me alone.

Dear Queen, of course you don't know me, but could you be the quiet, sore-footed woman who rode with the Raiders in Oromondo? I played the fife and you sang? I fell in love with you but was too much of a coward to admit it? By the way, I saw you die from the Magi's fireball so how did you get to Cascada and on the throne?

Perfect Timing" The night I fell in love with you I lost my watch: stripping off at the sea's edge, it fell into the dark as I swam out into a night thick with stars, with fisherman calling from one lit boat to another of their catches and harbours, leaving for the dawn. Imagine it now, plunged deep in cool sand, still hidden years later, grains ticking over it one by one— as your hands slide into me and I move to their pulse.

I wanted to remember what I could bear to remember and convince myself it was all there was.

I used to be twenty. Then I was twenty-one, twenty-two, and so on. And then I became a mother and could no longer even distinguish the difference between twenty-one and twenty-two or the difference between thirty-eight and thirty-nine.

When I'm back with my own memories I drink a glass of wine or a cup of coffee. It helps soften their pressure, but the effect fades. Then I think I should practice grace for what I've been given to remember, but whatever I do, I can't seem to forget what I want to forget. And then I think I don't need to write anything down ever again. Nothing's gone, not really. Everything that's ever happened has left its little wound. ?

In a hundred and fifty years no one alive will ever have known me. Being forgotten like that, entering that great and ongoing blank, seems more like death than death. ?

The memory and maybe the fact of every kiss start disappearing the moment the two mouths part.

To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget.

I knew I couldn't replicate my whole life in language.

I reread my favorite books to make sure they're still perfect, but rereading them wears away at their perfection.

I wrote about myself so I wouldn't become paralyzed by rumination—so I could stop thinking about what had happened and be done with it. More than that, I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention. Experience in itself wasn't enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I'd missed it.

The trouble was that I failed to record so much , I wrote, but how could I have believed that if I tried hard enough, I could remember everything?

Being forgotten like that, entering that great and ongoing blank, seems more like death than death.

On the page, these might look like the stones of a ruin, strewn by time and weather, but I was here.

Another friend said, I want to write sentences that seem as if no one wrote them. The goal being the creation of a pure delivery system, without the distraction of a style. The goal being a form no one notices, the creation of what seems like pure feeling, not of what seems like a vehicle for a feeling. Language as pure experience, pure memory. I too wanted to achieve that impossible effect.

There are no memories, just artifacts. And they're all lying.

Does the first time matter that much?

A woman I knew was so attached to the idea of having a terrible secret, she told me the same secret three times, each time as if for the first time.

The most fervent kiss of my life was less than five seconds long more than ten years ago with someone else's husband. It still hasn't quite worn off.

I hadn't remembered that in decades. That particular quiet.

In the morning I wake amid fading scenes of different characters, different settings, all restatements of that first desire, a ghost who haunts me as the beauty he was at sixteen.

I never joined Facebook because I want to preserve my old longings. And also yours.

In this way I can mourn him without having to think about him.