Quotes About Memory

I told you I wouldn't forget you...and as I'm sure you remember, the black rose is you.

I'm afraid that the gift of visiting the past is all that we have. We can revisit it, but only as it happened.

No, love could not be some great heedless unchanging thing. It was shifting ground, changing balance day to day. A word, a gift, a memory, a failed intention. We are only people being as we are, she thought. Anything else is self-deception.

I collect bits of conversation about Mr. Dupree. If I add everything together, it all amounts to one thing: When you hear how people talk about a man after he's dead, you want to live an interesting life, give them a reason to say, 'I miss that person.

When it's a memory, you already know the outcome so it's easy to think it was an easier time. Looking forward is much more uncertain, and is more complicated. But I don't think it is. Not really.

The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn't mean that the story isn't true, only that I honestly don't know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

Nostalgia seems like a harmless pastime until it renders you blind.

Home is the place you return to when you have finally lost your soul. Home is the place where life is born, not the place of your birth, but the place where you seek rebirth. When you no longer have to remember which tale of your own past is true and which is an invention, when you know that you are an invention, then is the time to seek out your home. Perhaps only when you have come to understand that can you finally reach home.

The day that I left my home, I had prayed that my children would forget me. I wanted to spare them the pain of remembering. But that night, as I crouched in the white mist, waiting, I knew more than anything that I wanted them to remember, I wanted desperately to go on living in someone's memory. If we are not remembered, we are more than dead, for it is as if we had never lived.

Don't leave me, Rainbow Girl." Rainbow Girl. Was that who I was? It seemed so long ago. I smiled faintly. "Remember the skirt I wore to Mallucé's the night you told me to dress Goth?" "It's upstairs in your closet. Never throw it away. It looked like a wet dream on you.

Don't accuse me of being morbid when I'm merely the product of a culture that buries the bones of the ones they love in pretty, manicured flower gardens so they can keep them nearby and go talk to them whenever they feel troubled or depressed. That's morbid. Not to mention bizarre. Dogs bury bones, too.

Yesterday was a memory. Tomorrow was a hope. Today was another day to live and do one's best to love

Sometimes I worry that there's not enough room in my brain for both my dreams and reality that I'm a hard drive with limited gigabytes and one day I won't be able to maintain the firewall between them. I wonder if that's what senility is.

Yesterday was a memory. Today was a hope.

Love is funny. Even though you don't have that person anymore, you still have the feeling. You didn't lose your LOVE. You lost the tangible, tactile, sense-sational ability to experience the person or animal you lost.

love doesn't die just because the person does

And he would never have instructed her to tell his past self such a story and expected himself to believe it.

Wither thou goest, there goest I, two flames sparked from but one ember; both forward and backward doth time fly, wither thou art, remember.

Kiss me as if you remember me. Inspire this wild god as once you did. Incite poetry and fire with your passion and perhaps I'll find a way.

And, although you think the memory of the battle won will be a pleasure—if it is a pleasure, you've lost the war.

I didn't want to hide the memory from you. I wanted to cram it down your goddamn throat. I wanted to force you to face it, to want it, to want me, to be willing to fight for what was possible between us with the same single-minded devotion as you fucked.

I forget nothing, Ms. Lane. I omit." "And evade." "Lie, cheat, and steal," he agreed. "If the shoe fits.

I can't scrape that memory off the inside of my skull fast enough!

I just wished she'd stop forgetting me. Like she didn't want to remember me. Or maybe she wished she'd never had me.