Quotes About Memory

I don't remember her name, but I do remember how her perm shone in the glow of our night-light.

Saw for a brief instant La Inca praying in her room - the silence that lay between them now, stronger than love - and in the gloaming of her dwindling strength there yawned a loneliness so total it was beyond death, a loneliness that obliterated all memory, the loneliness of a childhood where she'd not even had her own name.

He said hi to her almost every day, all upbeat and faux-happy, and she said hi back, indifferently, but that was it. He didn't imagine that she remembered their kissing—but of course he could not forget.

She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life

Strange how one minute life was a certain way and then it was another, and you couldn't remember what you'd done to make it all happen.

There exists for each of us a geographical fulcrum, a place so saturated with memory that within its precinct the past is always present.

and yet wasn't there something about [vampires] that struck a deep chord of recognition, even of memory? The teeth, the blood, the hunger, the immortal union with darkness -- what if these things weren't fantasy but recollection or even instinct, a feeling etched over eons into human DNA, of some dark power that lay within the human animal?

They say that the moment your life appears before your eyes will be your last, but I'm here to say that it's not so very different when you kiss a woman like Kate, whoever your Kate may be.

There was one world, of flesh and blood and bone, but also another—a deeper reality that ordinary people could glimpse only fleetingly, if at all. A world of souls, both the living and the dead, in which time and space, memory and desire, existed in a purely fluid state, the way they did in dreams.

There is power in a name. It is through names that we bring all things into this world, and when they leave, it is names we carry with us, so they are never truly gone.

The only thing he could come up with was the story of Joseph and Mary and the flight into Egypt—a boyhood memory, because Grey hadn't been to church in years. Joseph had always seemed like an odd duck, taking care of a woman who was carrying somebody else's baby. But Grey was beginning to see the sense in it, how a person could become attached just by being wanted.

And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on. —PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

The memory was unpleasant; he'd taken an instant disliking to the man. Compounding Peter's distrust, Chase was wearing a necktie, the most incomprehensible article of clothing in the history of the world.

But I suppose it's part of being old to feel that way, half in one world and half in the other, all of it mixed together in my mind. No one's left who even knows my name. Folks call me Auntie, on account of I never could have children of my own, and I guess that suits me fine. Sometime it's like I've got so many people inside of me I'm never alone at all. And when I go, I'll be taking them with me.

The world was real and you were in it, a brief part but still a part, and if you were lucky, and maybe even if you weren't, the things you'd done for love would be remembered.

But as with all such occurrences—those destined to be recounted not only in the immediate aftermath but for many years to come—time seemed compressed; it is a common error of memory to impose upon such events the coherence of a concentrated narrative, beginning with the assignment of a specific interval of time. That season. That year.

Someone once told me that part of you lives on so long as somebody remembers you.

All things fell into the past but one; and what that was, was love.

Why do certain arbitrary images stay with us, branded upon the walls of memory, while others sink forever into time's abyss?

again. The world was real and you were in it, a brief part but still a part, and if you were lucky, and maybe even if you weren't, the things you'd done for love would be remembered.

There was something in the pages of these books that had the power to make him feel better about things, a life raft to cling to before the dark currents of memory washed him downstream again, and on brighter days, he could even see himself going on this way for some time. A small but passable life.

As long as we remember a person, they're not really gone.

She did not recall the words, only the idea: that loss was love's accounting, its unit of measure, as a foot was made of inches, a yard was made of feet.

She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, Maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything. -Mark Strand, "In the Afterlife