Quotes About Memory

Barack Obama

Faulkner reminds us, the past is never dead and buried - it is not even past.

I wanted to think that she did look back, that she'd reveled in the memory of a long ago lover, or a perfect sun lit day in her youth when she'd experienced a bit of good fortune and the world had revealed itself to be big and full of promise.

Clinton lied. A man might forget where he parks or where he lives, but he never forgets oral sex, no matter how bad it is.

The worst thing about knowing that Gary Fairchild had been dead a month was seeing him every day at work.

I sometimes believe that the ability to survive on the memory of joy—or to transmit it—is the quality that most clearly separates the human from the beast.

Things in the margins, including humans who wander there, are often on the brink of becoming someone else, or something else, whose memory may not include the significance of old markers.

A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, so people imagine a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had. But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know.

Emelina and I took each other in. All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

I lost a child, she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

she's never forgotten, either, how a mystery caught in the hand could lose its grace

Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility

Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what's not in it.

An imperfectly remembered life is a useless treachery. Every day, more fragments of the past roll around heavily in the chambers of an empty brain, shedding bits of color, a sentence or a fragrance, something that changes and then disappears. It drops like a stone to the bottom of the cave.

I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign.

We both lay back down, and she looked at me in the eyes, and we were sad together for a while. I'll never forget how that felt. Like not being hungry.

This is how we celebrate the Day of the Dead in America: by turning up our collars against the scent of earthworms calling us home.

It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present." Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Sometimes the past can vanish.

According to her, if he hasn't been dead twenty years, he isn't history.

Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,' he said. 'We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.

You knew me well enough to find me here,' she said. And his scent burst onto her brain like a rain of lights, and his voice reached across the distance without words: 'I've always known you that well.' He wrapped her in his softness, touched her face with the movement of trees and the odor of wild water over stones, dissolving her need in the confidence of his embrace.

All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.