Quotes About Memory

Its not lying, it's remembering things the way they should have been.

I was tempted to run down to the kitchen, but the memory of Dad's words stopped me. "Fearful, nervous, insecure"--wasn't that what he'd told Aunt Blythe? She'd already seen me behave like a baby once today. I didn't want to give a repeat performance.

He looks like somebody wandering in a dark maze, clutching his little bit of goodness, knowing it's all he's got but not remembering what it is or how to use it.

feel like the bright past is coming through the gray present and I want to look at it one more time.

Maybe it would be better to hold her winglike shadow safe in the lock of his memory than to touch the breathing girl and lose her.

I was at his house.

The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead.

Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there is suffering involved. p. xx

You think you know the story so well. It's a mansion inside your head, each room just waiting to be described, but pretty much every memoirist I've ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changing shape around her. There are shattering earthquakes, tectonic-plate-type shifts. Or it's like memory is a snow globe that invariably gets shaken so as to shroud the events inside.

Novels have intricate plots, verse has musical forms, history and biography enjoy the sheen of objective truth. In memoir, one event follows another. Birth leads to puberty leads to sex. The books are held together by happenstance, theme, and (most powerfully) the sheer, convincing poetry of a single person trying to make sense of the past.

I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold.

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. Louise Glück, "Nostos

I've plumb forgot where I am for an instant, which is how a good lie should take you.

Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there's suffering involved.

At unexpected points in life, everyone gets waylaid by the colossal force of recollection.

The word daddy hung in the air outlined in gold. Closing my eyes, I found it in blue on my eyelids. I could feel the roots my daddy had grown in me—actual branches in my body. His was the ethos of country folk: people who kept raked dirt yards rather than grassy lawns because growing grass was too much like field work; people who kept the icebox on the porch, plugged in with an extension cord run through a window, so folks driving by would know they had one.

For all of memory's power to yank us back into an overwhelming past, it can also fail big time—both short-term (the lost vehicle in a parking lot, the name at the tip of your tongue) and long-term (we made out in high school?).

But whether you're a memoirist or not, there's a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past: it may continue to tug on you without your being aware of it. And lying about it can—for all but the most hardened sociopath—carve a lonely gap between your disguise and who you really are.

whether you're a memoirist or not, there's a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past:

I bent down the page, whose small triangle still marks the instant. Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by with all the wholesome prosperity they represent. And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message Mom ½, written in laundry pen, since no one in our family ever stood on ceremony.

I only breathe with one lung since you've gone , you say. And I love you with one hemisphere of my brain, the dumb one, the one that forgets.

nothing matters but the quality of the affection— in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind dove

the only parts I remember of my childhood are lies I told myself to feel better

El amor no puede conservarse para siempre en tercera persona del pretérito perfecto.