Quotes About Memory

Tell me, was it you or your brother who was killed in the war?

Memory, like love, is an act of imagination, an abandonment and a possession.

Here's the life lesson I've learned, Fifi: Some people are born to play the hero, and some are born to play the bad guy. Fighting your destiny only makes life harder than it needs to be. Besides, people remember the villain long after they've forgotten the hero.

For a moment he could have sworn he smelled violets, which was very peculiar, since he had no idea what violets smelled like, except somehow he knew they smelled just like Lady Emma.

There's a big Alzheimer's benefit in a couple of weeks. A charity ball is right after that. We eat, we smile, we pose. No balls. None. I'm sorry to hear that. Have you talked to a doctor?

Tess once walked into their bedroom and found them sitting up in bed, perfectly silent, holding hands in the twilight. That image had stayed with her, had given her the notion that love lasts forever.

Those moments that we remember. The tiniest moments or parts of a moment - a tap of a nail against a mug or the sound of a man swallowing, or how the sweeping beam finds the kitchen walls and then leaves them. We count the seconds, he and I.

Of course I remember. I remember my aching back and the drizzle, and the throb of my piercing in the top of my ear. I'd left university because of him. I'd learnt that I didn't want to be anywhere he wasn't, that I physically couldn't stand it. I was eighteen; he was in his early thirties. I came up the lane and found him standing there, under the limes, wearing blue.

She used to wear pretty clothes and be lively, when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town girls singing in the choir. But that—oh, that was thirty years ago.

Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope emerges for the future...Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in our hands.

The body remembers who we are supposed to be. And in this there is grief.

I will love you beyond my death. I will love you from another space that you will palpably feel, and feel to be me loving you." Albeit confused, that declaration seemed to speak of the intense emotions sustained by the urgent desire to continue loving the beloved until and after death. I want to live as long as the people I love live. We will live so long as the people we love remember we love them.

wildflower pressed into the page reading "Tintern Abbey." Jerry had marked a passage: If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance

For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.

Memory is like a long, dark street, illuminated at intervals in a light so bright that it shows up every detail. And then one plunges into the dark stretch again.

lonely, very lonely to have a past no one else can share.

Memory, which depends on the capacity to absorb ideas and information through exposition and to connect new information to an established edifice of knowledge, is one of the first victims of video culture. Without memory, judgments are made on the unsound basis of the most recent bit of half-digested information.

Words spoken in the heat of the moment may be forgiven; words preserved for ever on parchment may overreach their mark once passion has abated.

The cameras and the studio may not be following me, but my past definitely is.

You're not someone I could forget," he murmured.

And how they could have forgotten him, as though he was just a character in a book, dismissed once the covers closed?

I think this is the danger we face whenever time passes and those who have suffered recover from what flattened them. The generation coming up behind might underestimate or miss completely all that the older generation survived. Q.

we, as a society, archive our history. We don't want to forget where we've been and what we've seen. The past informs us, and can easily transform us, if we choose to let it. Q.

even that we only have for a little while. Even the candle is not ours to keep. And yet how we care for that candle for that stretch of time that it is still ours! How we want to remember the shape and fragrance of the little