Quotes About Memory

Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.

I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It's full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being 'objective.' Nostalgia for what? I don't know. Because I'd rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the 'Anna' of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

The tale must be rehearsed–and we may amuse ourselves imagining how these must have been, often, acrimonious, or at least in dispute. Whose version of events is going to be committed to memory by the Memories?

Nostalgia for what? I don't know. Because I'd rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the 'Anna' of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

Yet within a few minutes of waking, that country of dream has gone, its taste and reality has drained away into ordinary life. All you have left is an intellectual conviction held in a set of words. You want to remember. You try to remember. You have a set of words to offer your friend, or repeat to yourself. But the reality has gone, evaporated.

Di quali ricordi ci possiamo fidare? Basta solo pensarci di sfuggita per accorgersi che i ricordi sono sicuri quanto una bolla di sapone.

Los viejos saben por experiencia que a veces los recuerdos se alteran y el sentido cambia

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived a few weeks while you loved me.

He didn't consciously bring Brub to memory. It was one of those minnows of thought, darting through the unruffled pond of his thinking.

But not to our Muffin.

I've wed his two empty boots.' 'That you havena,' said Janet, Lady of Buccleuch, lowering her voice not at all in the presence of two hundred twittering Scott relations as they gazed after their vanishing husbands. 'They aye remember their boots. It's their empty nightgowns that get fair monotonous.

All the linear delicacy of the boy he had once been stood exposed now in the still, blindfolded face of her son. The clinging yellow hair, orderly on the white linen, was the same silk that had veiled her rings when she had smoothed his pillow in childhood; the cheekbone under the bandage had once, fresh and firm, been pressed to her own; the beautiful hands, lying loose on the damask, belonged to him and also to another man, whom she had placed before all others, and always would.

We all die,' said Nostradamus. 'The man you love. The man who loves you. The man you married. But because of you there will be something, I promise you, by which men will know Francis Crawford has been.

Danny Hislop touched his horse to ride, busily, beside Adam's. 'He remembered an appointment?' 'He remembered something you have forgotten,' Adam said. 'That this is his country.

But you loved my father,' he said. 'And Eloise's, of course. What was he like?' 'Like you,' Sybilla said. 'And worth all this?' Lymond said. 'Yes,' said Sybilla. 'Don't you, of all people, know what love can do?

You don't remember?" Sybilla said. "No. I don't suppose you do. You begged a favour of me, and once it was granted you had no reason to remember your promise. I will remind you. You said, 'I will promise anything. I will do anything you wish, to the end of my life, if you will tell me the name of the house that you know of.

He said something, and became aware that he was expected to leave. He felt like a dog, he thought, whose master had died. He left the house, but did not remember the journey to Fenchurch Street.

In Francis, there was so much that was admirable; and the flaws were so great. Yet one forgot them.

Men throughout Scotland and over the narrow seas who lived different lives because they had known him. To carry his bright legacy into the future, he did not require to have children. No one, once they had met him, could remain the same.

A long time afterwards, she was to remember what an excellent chess-player Francis Crawford was.

Why not? I thought we were speaking of death and dishonour? You would advance to your grave and I should join the ranks of your numerous dead: Diccon and Salablanca, Tosh and Christian Stewart; Oonagh; Will Scott and his father; Turkey Mat and Tom Erskine; the dog Luadhas; the child Khaireddin.… What shall I say to your son when I meet him? Don't be surprised: your sire loved me also?'

A reluctant watchdog, Culter held a post of small dignity, vulnerable to a thousand shafts of wit … which did not arrive. Francis at his most quiet, his most responsible showed his elder brother the face, Adam thought, his friends sometimes saw. And from that realized that Francis, in those final days, was drawing from obscurity an old friendship, to be remembered later maybe, and recognized.

A mind responsive to beauty is a storehouse with many rooms; words, sounds, textures, all the nobler exercises of the senses leave some image filed and folded to be summoned at need. There, too, the brutal images are kept: the sights and smells and hurts, real and imagined, which the responsive mind accepts and has bedded deep.