Quotes About Memory

I will begin to remember our walk in the third person, as if I'd seen it from the Manhattan Bridge, but, at the time of writing, as I lean against the chain-link fence intended to stop jumpers, I am looking back at the totaled city in the second person plural. I know it's hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is.  

And if we never slept together or otherwise 'realized' our relationship, I would leave Spain with this gorgeous possibility intact, and in my memory could always ponder the relationship I might have had in the flattering light of the subjunctive.

Y si nunca nos acostábamos ni desarrollábamos nuestra relación, me iría de España con esa preciosa posibilidad intacta, y en el recuerdo siempre podría reflexionar sobre la relación que podría haber mantenido a la favorecedora luz del subjuntivo.

It's never too early to think about your legacy, she would say. Don't you want to leave some kind of mark that you were here?

Los que no recuerdan el pasado están condenados a repetirlo».

the famous warning of Santayana: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Santayana: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

the brain can process two million bits of information per second. It remembers everything you've ever seen, everything you've ever heard…

The dead don't think of the living," Ethan said. "That part of their life is over.

If a man can't remember the laws," Ragnar said, "then he's got too many of them.

So long as we remember names, so long those people live.

That dawn is seared on my memory, burnt there by the flames of a hall-burning. There was nothing we could do except watch.

And at the end of life, what does it all matter? We grow old and the young look at us and can never see that once we made a kingdom ring for love.

Nor did he care about his childhood, for certainly I never heard him speak of it. I once questioned him about his early days and he would not answer. 'What is the egg to the eagle?' he asked me…

That man is my Arthur, a great warlord and a hero who fought against impossible odds to such effect that even fifteen hundred years later his enemies love and revere his memory.

All gone now, just memory is left, and memories fade. But the joy is bedded in the memory

Reputation! It is the one thing that outlives us. Men die, women die, all die, but reputation lives on like the echo of a song, and men crave reputation, as they crave the heavy arm rings that mark a warrior's victories.

And in the darkness, as I listen to the sea beat on the sand and the wind fret at the thatch, I remember what it was like to be young and tall and strong and fast. And arrogant.

Nor did he care about his childhood, for certainly I never heard him speak of it. I once questioned him about his early days and he would not answer. 'What is the egg to the eagle?' he asked me, then said he had been born, he had lived and he had become a soldier, and that was all I needed to know. (p97)

Did I know all that at eleven? Some, I think. It lay in my heart, unformed, unspoken, but hard as a stone. It would be covered over in time, half forgotten and often contradicted, but it was always there. Destiny is all, Ravn liked to tell me, destiny is everything. He would even say it in English, "Wyrd bi ful aræd.

Does that girl work here?' Robbie asked, gesturing at the screen behind which Mary had disappeared. 'All her life,' Sir Giles said. 'You remember Mary, Thomas?' 'I tried to drown her when we were both children,' Thomas said.

Where a boy runs he never forgets.

The geological layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive.

What will History say? - History, sir, will lie. As always.