Quotes About Memory

When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes.

delayed reciprocal altruism can evolve in species that are capable of recognizing and remembering each other as individuals

A book series is never truly over. The story lives on, even when the final page has been turned.

There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don't really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man's life. I was happy before I ever met H. I've plenty of what are called "resources." People get over these things. Come, I shan't do so badly.… Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this "commonsense" vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.

Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth.

Memory's only like justice, because it is another wrong idea that makes people feel right.

In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. To hold a gesture, a smell, a smile was to cast it as one fixed thing, a plaster death mask, which as soon as it was touched crumbled in his figures back into dust.

He read and reread 'Ulysses'. He looked back at Amy. They were the first beautiful thing I ever knew, Dorrigo Evans said.

and how if she didn't see him for another thirty years she would still love him, how she would still love him if he was dead until she was dead too.

A coat hanger of a body trying to remember the coat that years before had fallen off

And so he poured himself with renewed determination into her arms, into her conversations, into her fears and jokes and stories, hoping that this intimacy would finally smother all memory of Amy Mulvaney.

As a meteorite strike long ago explains the large lake now, so Amy's absence shaped everything, even when—and sometimes most particularly when—he wasn't thinking of her.

Nineveh, Tyre, a God-forsaken railway in Siam, Dorrigo Evans said, flame

Richard Flanagan

One small boy jumps over a table, pulls his jumper and shirt up, and turns his back to us to show where shrapnel wounded him when he was three. His classmates shriek with laughter.

I tried to write what I remembered of the day. It sounded terrible and noble all at once. But it wasn't any of those things.

Nothing endures. Don't you see, Bonox? That's what Kipling meant. Not empires, not memories. We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.

And since that is not how it has been for a long time, you want, this time, to make it last, this glistening one moment, this cool air, this new living, so that you can preserve a feeling of it, inasmuch as when it comes again it may just be too late. You may just be too old. And in truth, of course, this may be the last time that you will ever feel this way again.

He smiled at me, and it was not the worried, nervous smile from before, but a smile that meant he was pleased. And I don't remember him ever smiling at me that way again.

entering the past is a precarious business, since the past strives but always half-fails to make us who we are.

to encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen...

For the two of us, ours was just a version of life briefly perfected (though in a way that showed me something) and that ended.

The saved moment is the true art of love.

It was such a thing to see, a view I had never seen and have not since.