Quotes About Memory

fleeing into an imagined past

easier to imagine starting a family where we were known only as a couple—no memory of Rachel, no complicated preexisting social networks, no potentially difficult relations nearby. I wanted children badly, maybe in part to mark how different my second marriage was from the first.

And I felt as if it were true: as if she were dying and not dead, or as if the train could take me back in time.

It was as though it had already happened; predicting it felt like recalling a traumatic event.

Her breath smelled terrible and I told myself to commit that fact to memory, to remember it the next time I was intimidated by her unwavering grace.

While Bevan controlled the business of deception from within the Cabinet War Rooms, the fortified underground bunker beneath Whitehall, his counterpart in the Mediterranean was Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Wrangel Clarke, the chief of "A" Force, the deception unit based in Cairo. Clarke was another master of strategic deception, but of a very different stamp. Unmarried, nocturnal, and allergic to children, he was possessed of "an ingenious imagination7 and a photographic memory.

Everyone rehearses their recollections, believing that the more often an event is remembered, the closer we come to its reality. This is not always true. Most people tell a version of the past, and then either stick to or embellish it.

journalists (another tribe adept at misremembering the past)

After a while, when nothing happened, when no reprisals fell on us, it seemed that nothing significant had happened. Some of us began to distrust our memories. We began to think that we had collectively dreamt up the fevers of that night. It wouldn't be the first or the last time. Meanwhile, the river of wild jaguars flowed below the surface of our hungry roads.

Things she had said started to come back to him. How she out-stared a snake in the backyard. How the soldiers would stop buses and commandeer a woman at the slightest whim. How one day, as she was daydreaming in the office, three male-spirits came in through the walls and, with their heads facing backwards, tried to force her to make love to them.

And he remembered only because he didn't want to have to go through it all over again, making all the mistakes of his confusion.

The past that Southerners are forever talking about is not a dead past--it is a chapter from the legend that our kinfolks have told us, it is a living past, living for a reason. The past is a part of the present, it is a comfort, a guide, a lesson.

I recall Lina as extremely intelligent, with refined European tastes.

the enduring human need to be remembered.

Now turn the page, come along on the ride, and let me tell you about the death and life of Charlie St. Cloud

S'interruppe.<> ( Ho sognato di te )

You'll miss me, yes you will You won't know how much until I'm gone Like the sweet memory of something you used to love

For Lethe is for no man set, And in Hell may no man forget.

Bendito olvido, que es la moneda falsa del perdón, y corre de mano en mano produciendo admirables efectos!

Another circumstance of note was the fact that they never spoke about the past: that particular novel, they both seemed to agree, was over and done with, doubtless because it seemed so improbable and false, rather like the books we were mad about in our youth and which, in our maturity, seem somewhat paltry.

I believe if I should die, and you were to walk near my grave, from the very depths of the earth I would hear your footsteps.

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

He watched her as she held the door for Maggie to pass through with the soup. Her hair was the color of rain-wet wheat. He had chosen her sister, Delia Crawford; Delia the dark one; Delia who died.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.