Quotes About Memory

I wish i could press snowflakes in a book like flowers.

Mark Twain's memory had become capricious and his vivid imagination did not always supply his story with details of crystal accuracy.

You always remember your first overdose.

His absence has only made him more present.

There's one good kind of writer -- a dead one.

I couldn't even picture Mavis's face anymore. It was sad. She was being erased. I wanted to put my finger on her forehead, but there was nothing there.

The story of Harold Ross, the New Yorker and me is a mere footnote to the story of our time, and we might as well face the truth that to researchers of the future, poking about among the ruins of time, we shall all be tiny glitters. But then, so are diamonds.

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star

cloudbursts of memory and hallucination crashing in on me from all sides

He was one of those language teachers who rely heavily on mnemonics. ("Agathon. Do you know how I remember that word? 'Agatha Christie writes good mysteries.' Ã¢â'¬Â) Henry's look of contempt was indescribable. The rest of us were silent and humiliated

It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all; and it is with him that I am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basically reinvent.

Welty's instruction; that I'd had a concussion. That I hadn't

Twelve years after Robin's death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard that they had known on the day it happened.

you should never get a person's name tattooed on you, because then you lose the person. I was too young to know that when I got the tattoo.

But even that day, there on the porch, with Charles beside me and the smell of wood smoke in the air, it had a quality of a memory; there it was, before my eyes, and yet too beautiful to believe

Hay cosas tan terribles que no podemos entenderlas inmediatamente. Y hay cosas —desnudas, farfullantes, indelebles tan horrorosas— demasiado terribles para que lleguemos a entenderlas jamás. Sólo más adelante, en la soledad, en la memoria, nos damos cuenta: cuando las cenizas se han enfriado, cuando ya se han marchado los dolientes; cuando miras a tu alrededor y te encuentras, para tu sorpresa, en un mundo completamente diferente.

Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things—naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror—are too terrible to really ever grasp at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory, that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself—quite to one's surprise—in an entirely different world.

It used to be a perfectly ordinary day but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.)

Strange, I thought, as I jumped a sheet of water at the curb, how a few hours could change everything—or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.

passed—Snoopy, Ronald McDonald

I was floating around up there like a feather, a trick from early childhood that was fading as I got older.

lo extraño era más bien descubrir en el presente un fragmento tan brillante del pasado vivo, dañado y erosionado pero no destruido.

Yet even in death, my dad was ineradicable, no matter how hard I tried to wish him out of the picture– for there he always was, in my hands and my voice and my walk, in my darting sideways glance as I left the restaurant with Hobie, the very set of my head recalling his old, preening habit of checking himself out in any mirror-like surface.