Quotes About Memory

Es imposible adivinar el final de una historia mientras la estás viviendo; carece de contornos y se constituye como una serie de palabras y datos incipientes y, para ser sinceros, nunca recuperamos toda la información de aquello que fue.

We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backward, too, not only forward, and thereby rebuild the curious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable.

Do you know that I can't remember her face? Try as I may, it will not be conjured. I can tell you what she looked like; I can recite a description of her features, part by part, but I cannot evoke the whole face.' 'Don't you have a photograph?' 'Photographs!' He spat out the word. 'I'm talking about true recollection - seeing the face.

In a way," I said to him, "that now you're talking about hardly exists. We feel it, but it's impossible to measure. The past is always eating up the present.

El tiempo no es algo externo a nosotros, vive en nuestro interior. Sólo nosotros vivimos el pasado, presente y futuro, y el presente es demasiado efímero para que seamos plenamente conscientes de él; sólo después lo recordamos y entonces lo hacemos de forma codificada, si no se disuelve en la amnesia.

I move through it like a phantom, and I have begun to wonder what actually happens in our brains when we return to half-remembered places. What is memory's perspective? Does the man revise the boy's view or is the imprint relatively static, a vestige of what was once intimately known?

Om jag inte kände det jag känner när jag ser dig skulle du vara någon annan. Det vore hemskt. Om jag inte mindes att jag älskar dig, menar jag. (190)

I'm fond of that little scene. Whether my memory is completely accurate or not, it has a sharpness that nothing I look at now can possibly have.

that 'now' you're talking about hardly exists. We feel it, but it's impossible to measure. The past is always eating up the present." I stroked his hair and paused. "I think I've always loved paintings for that reason. Somebody makes a canvas in time, but after it's made, a painting stays in the present.

Who had read my poems, who held my hand, who was dead before he could visit me in the hospital where he had been, too, landed, too, on his flights to heaven and drops into hell.

When I take this walk, the apartment is always empty. I move through it like a phantom, and I have begun to wonder what exactly happens in our brains when we return to half-remembered places. What is memory's perspective? Does the man revise the boy's view or is the imprint relatively static, a vestige of what was once intimately known?

There is no perception without memory. But good art surprise us. Good art reorients our expectations, forces us to break the pattern, to see in a new way.

Maybe the world isn't enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language.

The page can resurrect what's lost and what's dead, what's not there anymore and what was never there.

The truth is that what fascinates me is not so much being in a place as not being there: how places live in the mind once you have left them, how they are imagined before you arrive, or how they are seemingly called out of nothing to illustrate a thought or story like my tree down yonder. These mental spaces map our Innes lives more fully than any "real" map, delineating the borders of here and there that also shape what we see in the present.

We drank coffee. We talked. She loved Charles Dickens, whom she read in Norwegian. Years after she was dead, I wrote a dissertation on Dickens, and though my study of the great man would no doubt have alarmed her, I had a funny feeling that by taking on the English novelist I was returning to my Norwegian roots.

What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.

En mayor o menor medida, todos inventamos nuestro pasado.

To forget is ordinary. Even people in mourning, distracted by some little happiness, forget the dead.

No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.

Normal life includes making sense of fragmentary memories.

Like everyone, Bill rewrote his life. The recollections of an older man are different from those of a young man. What seemed vital at forty might lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

Memories that have never been told aren't yet solid stories; they are potential stories. It may be that the interlocutor is the self, as in John Harmon's monologue, but it is always the self in relation to the idea of another, the "I" addressing a "you," because the desire to tell implies that the tale must become comprehensible to a listener.

Augustine's insight that emotion dims in memory, however, is overwhelmingly true of our episodic memories. The cooling of the emotions that belong to such recollections is built into the nature of this kind of memory, because it is quickly turned into narrative.