Quotes About Memory

We can't remember our infancies, but they live in our bodies, and had I not been frail at birth, I would have been someone else, and I would have had other thoughts.

Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past.

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. The raw affective material of memories is restructured and then told as stories from a remove.

My memory of the school building itself, its rooms and lockers, blackboards, and hallways, bring on a heavy, oppressive feeling. Whether I was more unhappy in school than any of my friends I don't know. I never would have said I didn't like school, and there are moments I distinctly remember enjoying, but these truths don't alter my memory of that place.

We are all, to one degree or another, made of what we call "memory", not only the bits and pieces of time visible to us in pictures that have hardened with our repeated stories, but also the memories we embody and don't understand.

It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.

It may be that I link every library to that first one - to my early childhood experience of drawing on the floor near my father's desk. A library is of course a real place, but it is also an unreal one. What happens there is mostly silent. I think I've always liked the whispering aspect of libraries, the hushing librarians and my feeling of solitude among many.

the forgotten back-and-forth of early life becomes who we are.

The black-and-white figures of the photographs have had to stand in place of my memory and yet I have always felt that their unmarked graves became a part of me. What was unwritten then is inscribed into what I call myself.

Sje?aš se kad si mi rekao da imam lijepa koljena? Nikad mi se nisu svi?ala moja koljena. Zapravo, mislila sam da su ružna. Ali, tvoje su ih o?i rehabilitirale. Bez obzira na to ho?u li te ikad više vidjeti, proživjet ?u svoj život s dva lijepa koljena.

In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later.

Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn't bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that.

How many other are there? I thought. People, things, seen and then forgotten, leaving nothing behind them, not even the knowledge that they're missing.

El pasado es frágil, tan frágil como quebradizos los huesos con los años, tan frágil como los fantasmas que vemos en las ventanas o los sueños que se descomponen al despertar y no dejan atrás nada aparte de una sensación de inquietud o angustia, o, menos a menudo, una extraña satisfacción.

My life had shrunk, and when I thought of past events, when I talked to my parents on the phone, when I saw an acquaintance or fellow student on the street, all these things seemed to be from another lifetime.

But the child inevitably haunts the adult, even when the former self is no longer recognizable.

Years later, when I was grown (much taller than he ever grew) and I saw him in a local bar, he remembered my "crush" and said he regretted not acting on it. As silly as it sounds, this confession of his gave me real satisfaction, but the fact is he didn't want the fourteen-year-old I had been but the twenty-two-year-old I had become - another person altogether.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should. I'd hoped that he'd be eulogizing me.

Gone is gone. I never miss anything or anyone because it all becomes a lovely memory. I guard my memories and love them, but I don't get in them and lie down.

The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.

You just watch somebody you love slowly, slowly disappear and go away.

And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a film.

One could not live without delicacy, but when / I think of love I think of the big, clumsy-looking / hands of my grandmother, each knuckle a knob.