Quotes About Memory

How do you give someone a piece of sky? Memorize it. Then write it down for him.

She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Liesel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist's suit collection. She kissed him long and soft, and when she pulled herself away, she touched his mouth with her fingers.

Very quickly, very suddenly, words fell through my mind. They landed on the floor of my thoughts, and in there, down there, I started to pick the words up. They were excerpts of truth gather from inside me. Even in the night, in bed, they woke me. They painted themselves onto the ceiling. They burned themselves onto the sheets of memory laid out in my mind. When I woke up the next day, I wrote the words down, on a torn-up piece of paper. And to me, the world changed color that morning.

Liesel was sure her mother carried the memory of him, slung over her shoulder. She dropped him. She saw his feet and legs and body slap the platform. How could that woman walk? How could she move? That's the sort of thing I'll never know, or comprehend-what humans are capable of. Death-

Keep playing, Papa. Papa stopped.

I also fear that nothing really ends at the end. Things just keep going as long as memory can wield its axe, always finding a soft part in your mind to cut through and enter.

He must have loved her so incredibly hard. So hard that he would never ask for her lips again, and would go to his grave without them.

Ich fürchte ebenfalls, dass am Ende gar nichts zu Ende sein wird. Die Dinge gehen einfach weiter, solange die Erinnerung das Sagen hat und immer eine weiche Stelle in deinen Gedanken findet, um an die Oberfläche zu schlüpfen.

Footsteps crease the grass behind us.

So many humans. So many colors. They keep triggering inside me. They harass my memory. I see them tall in their heaps, all mounted on top of each other. There is air like plastic, a horizon like setting glue. There are skies manufactured by people, punctured and leaking, and there are soft, coal-colored clouds, beating like black hearts. And then. There is death. Making his way through all of it. On the surface: unflappable, unwavering. Below: unnerved, untied, and undone.

Anhelaba volver a la inconsciencia de entonces, a sentir tanto amor sin saberlo y a confundirlo con las risas y el pan untado con poco más que el aroma de la mermelada.

On quite a few occasions Liesel forgot about her mother and any other problem of which she currently held ownership.

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling up time in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too - leave them behind. You don't know about the habit they have, of coming back. Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

Los primeros días se sentaban a su lado y hablaban con él. El día de su cumpleaños le dijo que si se despertaba abrí un enorme pastel esperándole en la cocina. No se despertó. No hubo pastel.

We smile a last smile, and I walk away. I feel her watching me, but I don't look back.

a beautiful, tear-stomped girl,shaking the dead.

How strange it is, sometimes, which conversations or events stays with us while so much else melts as fast as April snow.

the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good and thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past

The rolls of music that she herself had thrown into the trash with the pretext that they had rotted from dampness kept spinning and playing in her memory.

I once read that forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past…but forgiving is not the same as obliterating memory.

your neocortex is the part of your brain that tracks time.

I remember every word ever said to me. That was a lie. Who would want that? Most of it I delete from permanent memory.

To remember a day would take a day. To remember a year would take a year.

Esprit de l'escalier: spirit of the staircase, wishing you'd said, wishing you'd done. Yet how much more indelible it was when the staircase was the staircase that led to the bedroom.