Quotes About Memory

Se spariranno i libri, sparirà la storia, e spariranno anche gli esseri umani ... I libri non sono soltanto la somma arbitraria dei nostri sogni, e la nostra memoria. Ci offrono anche un modello di autotrascendenza. C'è chi pensa che la lettura sia soltanto una forma di evasione: un'evasione dal mondo «reale» di tutti i giorni, verso un mondo immaginario, il mondo dei libri. I libri sono molto di più. Sono una maniera per essere pienamente umani.

It's not love that the past needs in order to survive, it's an absence of choices.

To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

And it is in this gap between resemblance and identity that nostalgic desire arises. The nostalgic is enamored of distance, not of the referent itself. Nostalgia cannot be sustained without loss.

When something changes your life, Lisette, you remember everything.

An event in the present evokes past sensations. But science couldn't explain how a foolish heart had the power to overrule common sense.

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them. —John Banville

was gone, suddenly and irretrievably, like a zephyr shooting into the night sky, leaving a trail of moonlit particles that swirled in brief, unspeakable beauty, and then faded into nothing.

I see her in my dreams," he said. "Every night.

There, a simple headstone marked the grave of Eva Saloman Johansen, beloved wife and grandmother. Tess was intrigued to see a phrase in Hebrew characters. Her paternal grandmother had apparently been Jewish. Beside that was a marker for Erik Karl Johansen, inscribed, 'Measure his life not by its length but by the depths of joy he brought us. He jumped into life and never touched bottom. We will never laugh the same again.

The Sunrose Building is part of my blood and bone. It is a repository of treasures seen and unseen. I need to stay in order to keep my mind from wandering away. It is the only way to keep the world intact.

No, this was the kind of moment that made everything stop. You separated it from every other one, pressing the feeling to your heart, like a dried flower slipped between the pages of a beloved book. The moment was made of something fragile and delicate, yet it possessed the power to last forever.

Why do we remember the bad stuff and not the good?

More than a thousand veterans still remained unaccounted for, and his father, Richard Arthur Finnemore, was one of them.

DEDICATION In memory of my dad, Nick Klist —with deepest gratitude for all the love, the courage, the laughter, and the wisdom of a lifetime. He lives in the hearts of those who loved him.

He was killed while serving in the military, during operation Desert Storm." She had only the vaguest recollection of the conflict. She had been in grade school when it was going on, and the conflict had been as remote as a space shuttle launch. Seeing the man in the picture, with his hauntingly familiar smile, suddenly made it real to her. "I'm terribly sorry.

In time, the grief turned into a dull ache with occasional flares of agony. It was like a fading bruise Annie forgot about until she bumped into a memory. Gran. It was the little moments that pierced most sharply, the remembrance of a smile, a gesture, a soft-voiced phrase.

No amount of liquor could make him forget the things he yearned to erase from his mind—

What we remember from childhood we remember forever—permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen. —CYNTHIA OZICK, AMERICAN WRITER, B. 1928

Step softly—a dream lies buried here.

Let's get lunch at Aunt Carrie's. She looked away, trying to hide her vivid memories of the outdoor café. She and Alex had gone there as kids, sunburnt, their hair stiff with salt and their bare feet, to eat clam cakes and blueberry pie.

My last thought before I fell asleep was: He is dead. My only friend. My only enemy.

People call me a philosopher or a scientist or an anthropologist. I am none of those things. I am an anamnesiologist. I study what has been forgotten. I divine what has disappeared utterly. I work with absences, with silences, with curious gaps between things. I am really more of a magician than anything else.' Laurence Arne-Sayles, interview in The Secret Garden, May 1976