Quotes About Memory

I remember everything, Trent. Not just the bad, but the good, too.

it. Oh, crap. He'd forgotten all about Ellen, but

Either you understood impulsive rage, and the memory failures that sometimes go with it, or you didn't. That was it.

People don't like to speak ill of the dead even when they're monsters, let alone when they're loved ones. People like to forget any bad things that someone did and why should they remember?

Lesley said that my exes knew that past a certain point I'd lost interest, and that's why they always packed me in first. That's not the way I remember it, but Lesley swore she could have constructed a calendar based on my love life. A cyclical one, she said, like the Maya – counting down to disaster. Lesley could be surprisingly erudite sometimes.

I woke in the hour before dawn, stuck in that strange state where the memory of your dreams is still powerful enough to motivate your actions.

never run a game of Hide the Lady if you can't remember where you've put the queen, because some people embrace forensic accounting as a blood sport.

Remembering can be a hard thing on a man," he suggested. "I wear life like an old pair of shoes that's easy on my feet.

I only remember the end of my dreams, like waking up at a steering wheel, or falling.

This is how it happens: you can't imagine a person being out of your life until you can't imagine how she ever could have been in your life in the first place.

In the end, Harrington documented more than 130 languages, including Chemehuevi, Mohave, Serrano, Paiute, even K'iche'. Many of them are no longer spoken anywhere on this planet. They are preserved only in Harrington's careful records and perhaps in the fading childhood memories of the descendants of their last surviving speakers.

And through all that dreadful darkness she had remembered him. He who loved her. He who still loved her. Who would always love her.

I accept that one day, my music will be gone forever. So will the Sistine Chapel, Bruce Lee movies, and all the silly arts and crafts my aunt ever bought. Gone with the wind. Making songs is something I do here and now. Because light captured is just a moment, a flicker.

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rottin', either write things width reading or do things worth writing.

Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer's habit to remember nothing good of himself. I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.

The players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, "Would he had blotted a thousand."… I loved the man [Shakespeare] and do honor his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any.

Memory, of all the powers of the mind, is the most delicate and frail.

I think I'd felt that as long as I avoided looking for the tickets, they would be there; it was only if I searched the archive that they'd disappear, as if the past were up until that point indeterminate, that I might outrun it.

The feeling of a fiction collapsing inside you. A fiction you'd forgotten was there. Frame, crossbeams, slats, braces, joins. Revealing the softer sapwood, which is marked by candle burns. ...Jonathan holding both of my hands under the table, one of the first times we'd really touched. You must think I'm a lunatic. No, I think it's a beautiful story. About family and art and memory and meaning, how it's made and unmade.

None of the past was usable.

The momentary sense of having traveled back in time.

Whenever I walked across the Manhattan Bridge, I remembered myself as having crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. This is because you can see the latter from the former, and the latter is more beautiful. [...] But by the time I arrived in Brooklyn to meet Alex, I was starting to misremember crossing in the third person, as if I had somehow watched myself walking beneath the Brooklyn Bridge's Aeolian cables.

How many of his small gestures and postures in the present were embodied echoes of the past, repetitions just beneath the threshold of his consciousness? What would happen to the past if you brought those involuntary muscle memories under your control and edited them, edited them out?

Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they could not be remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they'd faded from the photograph.