Quotes About Memory

Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border we cross.

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead.

You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing.

I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.

There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.

As if this collection of things is what she is. So we fall in love with ghosts.

I was fourteen then. He was eighteen. Everything is biographical, Lucien Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.

Nowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.

But when we are searching for an example of what we no longer have, we see it everywhere.

A memoir is the lost inheritance.

if you do not plunder the past, the absence feeds on you

The jackal with one eye that looks back and one that regards the path you consider taking. In his jaws are pieces of the past he delivers to you, and when all of that time is fully discovered it will prove to have been already known.

we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives

No story is ever told just once.

Now where does he sit as he thinks of her? These years later. A stone of history skipping over the water, bouncing up so she and he have aged before it touches the surface again and sinks.

Blood a necklace on me all my life.

She was secure in the miniature world she had built; the two other men seemed distant planets, each in his own sphere of memory and solitude.

Not that we are touched by such things as concern, even if false, when we are young. But now, in retrospect, I am touched.

AÅŸk, insan?n kendini ve geçmiÅŸini tüketmesidir.

There's no trustworthy recording of ages when seen through the eyes of youth

Wherever Hana is now, in the future, she is aware of the line of movement Kip's body followed out of her life. Her mind repeats it. The path he slammed through among them. When he turned into a stone of silence in their midst. She recalls everything of that August day— what the sky was like, the objects on the table in front of her going dark under the thunder.

We are all the people we have ever known. We carry them for the rest of our lives, across every border we cross

What do you hate most? he asks. -A lie. And you? -Ownership, he says. When you leave me, forget me.

He spends hours with the Englishman, who reminds him of a fir tree he saw in England, its one sick branch, too weighted down with age, held up by a crutch made out of another tree. It stood in Lord Suffolk's garden on the edge of the cliff, overlooking the Bristol Channel like a sentinel. In spite of such infirmity he sensed the creature within it was noble, with a memory whose power rainbowed beyond ailment.