Quotes About Memory

people are never like what you remember them. You make them, as the years go by, more and more the way you wish them to be, and as you think you remember them. If you want to remember them as agreeable and gay and handsome, you make them far more so than they actually were.

One cannot, ever, go back to the place which exists in memory. you would not see it with the same eyes-even supposing that it should improbably have remained much the same. What you have had you have had. 'The happy highways where I went, And shall not come again...' Never go back to a place where you have been happy. Until you do it remains alive for you. If you go back it will be destroyed.

Six people were thinking of Rosemary Barton who had died nearly a year ago...

I don't want to write about it at all. I want, you see, to think about it as little as possible. Hercule Poirot was dead - and with him died a good part of Arthur Hastings.

Such a sweet letter from Lady Conway... You remember my telling you about her? Her memory's bad. Can't recognize her relations always and tells them to go away." "That might be shrewdness really," said Miss Marple, "rather than a loss of memory.

Faces are tricky unless you can connect up when and where you'd seen them.

She couldn't let the past go and she could never see the future as it really was, only as she imagined it to be.

In moments of great stress, the mind focuses itself upon some quite unimportant matter which is remembered long afterwards with the utmost fidelity, driven in, as it were, by the mental stress of the moment. It may be some quite irrelevant detail, like the pattern of a wallpaper, but it will never be forgotten.

It was a fantastic moment. In it, Anthony Marston seemed to be something more than mortal. Afterwards more than one of those present remembered that moment.

It is curious to look back over life, over all the varying incidents and scenes - such a multitude of odds and ends. Out of them all what has mattered? What lies behind the selection that memory has made? What makes us choose the things that we have remembered? It is as though one went to a great trunk full of junk in an attic and plunged one's hands into it and said, 'I will have this - and this - and this.

But afterwards you went on remembering.

I suppose I saw photos of him in the papers, but I wouldn't recognize my own mother when a press photographer had done with her.

when anything beautiful's dead, it's a loss to the world.

You know, Maureen, I seem to have seen that name somewhere." "Home Perm, perhaps. He looks like a hairdresser." Poirot winced.

the elephant can remember.

I think I said that every generation had its weaklings--that that was one of the penalties of greatness--but that their failings were seldom remembered by posterity.

The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years.

Oh, fancy! All these. I really have forgotten a lot of these. Oh, here's The Amulet and here's The Psamayad. Here's The New Treasure Seekers. Oh, I love all those. No, don't put them in shelves yet, Albert. I think I'll have to read them first.

These older people were the limit... They harped on things so.

I recalled the leering drunken old man, and the toil-worn face of the dead woman—and I shivered a little at the remorselessness of time….

But how can any one be in there? There's no door except into this room. Your memory is excellent, Hastings. Now for the deductions.

Time goes a different pace in different places. Some places you come back to, and you feel that time has been busting along at a terrific rate and that all sorts of things will have happened - and changed.

Ah, yes, I remember reading about that—shocking affair. I don't think I actually ever came across the fellow, though, of course, I knew of him. Toby Armstrong. Nice fellow. Everybody liked him. He had a very distinguished career. Got the V.C.

That was what murder was-as easy as that! But afterwards you went on remembering...