Quotes About Memory

After Father died, she told me that it felt strange to have hands anymore, what with no one to hold them.

A scar had been beaten into his mind which would only heal by experience.

Mister. Nothing is forever. Only death is permanent. Nothing is forever except what you did to me.

THERE ARE moments of great luxury in the life of a secret agent. There are assignments on which he is required to act the part of a very rich man; occasions when he takes refuge in good living to efface the memory of danger and the shadow of death; and times when, as was now the case, he is a guest in the territory of an allied Secret Service.

Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life - with gratitude, or profound and particular regret.

It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence.

How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.

At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened.

She sleepwalked from moment to moment, and whole months slipped by without memory, without bearing the faintest imprint of her conscious will.

When love dies and marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light.

Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.

He had been walking these roads, he thought, all his life.

How quickly the dead faded into each other

You may never have experienced, or you will have forgotten, a good burgundy (her favourite) or a good Sancerre (also her favourite) decanted through a healthy placenta.

Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self. And if that works, why not feeling disgust for shit, fearing the cliff edge and strangers, remembering insults and favours, liking sex and food? God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.

When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation.

Lucy had told me more than once that the past was a burden, that it was time to tear everything down.

He did not want to see her photograph and discover what the years had wrought, or hear about the details of her life. He preferred to preserve her as she was in his memories, with the dandelion in her buttonhole and the piece of velvet in her hair, the canvas bag across her shoulder, and the beautiful strong-boned face with its wide and artless smile.

Childhoods shine through adult skin, helpfully or not.

It's a matter of dishonour, and when it gets out, which it's bound to, this will be the one act you'll be remembered for. Everything else you achieved will be irrelevant. Your reputation will rest only on this, because ultimately reality is social, it's among others that we have to live and their judgements matter.

When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past.

Unlike in Daisy's novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of misinterpretations are not often resolved. Nor do they remain pressingly unresolved. They simply fade. People don't remember clearly, or they die, or the questions die and new ones take their place.

instructions

I, o Bože, voleo sam i ja nju. Bez obzira na to koliko sam mislio na Klarisu, u se?anju ili o?ekivanju, to što sam je doživeo ponovo, osetio i ?uo, ona neosporna ljubav koja je strujala izme?u nas, to zapravo životinjsko prisustvo, uvek bi me, mada poznato, uzdrmalo kao neo?ekivano.