Quotes About Memory

When a thing is told to you and you can't remember it happening it doesn't count somehow. It is as though it had nothing to do with you. Remembering, that's what counts.

What could he be thinking of? He seemed to be trying to remember something, perhaps an engagement, perhaps an excuse to leave her. For eventually, they all made some excuse.

In the carnival hall of mirrors which is our memory, we distort what we see. In Ernie's mirror image of me, I am magnified, elongated into a girl who led him on, the object of his great, unhappy, unfulfilled love. While he, in the equal if opposite distortion of my mind's mirror, is reduced to a squat manikin from my past, a dull stranger, remembered only for his minor quirks.

She was thinking that she was foolish to hope that someday, if she found the right path, she would be continuously happy. No one is that fortunate. The moments of beauty, the moments when you feel blessed, are only moments; but memory and imagination, treasuring them, can string them together like the delicate glories on the necklace her father had given her. Everything else passes away; that which you love remains. She had to believe this, even if she wasn't sure it was true.

When she was little, her father, just before he went to bed, used to check his watch and ask in surprise, "How did it get so late so early?

For a parent, time is not a one-way street. In Janine's mind, the nineteen-year-old Emily was accompanied, shadowed, by the infant Emily, and the toddler Emily, and Emily in all her other incarnations. So when she came out with a shrewd perception or a sophisticated thought, it was always something to marvel at, because it was as if the five-year-old Emily were saying it too. A parent is perpetually thinking, "Where did she learn that?

A man lives for as long as we carry him inside us

How long is a man's life, finally? Is it a thousand days, or only one? One week, or a few centuries? How long does a man's death last? And what do we mean when we say, 'gone forever'?

When we forget where we've come from, it is easy to complain.

I'm lucky that SFWA has such a short memory. I was always the Young Turk, the gadfly. Part of the New Wave, although I didn't fit in there either! I spent years, and two histories, putting the so-called Old Guard in their place, and now I'm one of them!

Survival is important, but even so, I'm still thinking about that almost-kiss as I head off to my room.

A]nd the unveiled figure Of the self stepping unclothed, sweetly stripped Of its leaf, into starlight, and the shadow of night, The cold water warm around the narrow ankles, The body at its most weightless, a thing so durable It will–like the carved stone figures holding up The temple roof–stand and remember its gods Long after those gods have been forsaken. —Brigit Pegeen Kelly, from "Plants Fed On by Fawns," The Orchard (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2004)

The past comes back once and then it keeps coming back and coming back, not just one part of the past but all of it, the forgotten crowd of your life breaks out of the gallery and comes rushing at you, and there is no sense in hiding from the crowd, it will find you; it's your crowd, you're the only one it's looking for.

And I thought that maybe this was what it means to get old: to have someone much younger remind you of how you weren't the same person you used to be.

That was his phrase - "the high ramparts of my defensiveness"- and I remembered it in case I ever decide to build and then describe my own ramparts.

Detail exists not only to make us remember the things we don't want to, but to remind us that there are some things we don't deserve to forget.

And then I remembered the truck my aunt had stolen, and I wondered if my aunt was rich or if she'd just stolen from rich people, or if there was a difference. My aunt, I suspected, would say that there was no difference. As for John Calvin, he once said that "the torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.

Because when you say you miss someone, you also mean you miss the way you were before you started missing someone.

Remembering is easy. It's forgetting that's hard.

yesterday, returning from Wawela I had some ethnological ideas, but I can't remember what they were.

a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.

I compare it to being in a car accident. There's so much adrenaline rushing through you that you remember being in the accident but you don't remember any of the details.

In every age "the good old days" were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

And there the trail ended: with the quotation exposed as a half-remembered story told by a dead man who might or might not have seen it in a newspaper around 1925, and might or might not have recalled it correctly decades later.