Quotes About Memory

If she dreamed, she did not remember when she awoke.

I stay in that state of mind for the next couple of days, in the places that only exist in the past. The things you can't undo get lodged in the darkest corners of your mind, where nothing ever seems to get solved, just recycled into new anxiety.

Wilder's "truth" was less a matter of fact than of her memories, feelings, and convictions. Her work was based on facts but not factual. It was historical fiction, not history. Its chronology, and certain incidents and characters, were invented, altered, and fictionalized.

In the peculiar alchemy of literature, the daughter was adept at creating in fiction what she had not known in her own childhood.

Sweet By and By,

Their school was taught by William Masters's brother, Samuel Masters, whom the children called "Uncle Sam." He was a tall, thin, bald man with bad breath and a worrying habit of fondling girls' hands. Laura protected herself by concealing a pin in her fingers and stabbing him with it. After that, she said, he left her alone.

He was already fading. I knew that it wouldn't be long until he was just a vague image, however much I tried to cling onto his memory.

The last few days, including today, of wind and dust have finished any lingering hope of wheat for us and I feel myself that we simply threw away the carefully hoarded barley seed. Hardly any hope that it had time to sprout or could survive if it had under present 'dust bowl' conditions. I always said I was the only one who could remember those dreadful days - for any practical purpose. People have simply assumed it couldn't happen again (1951)

Talking to you is like traveling through time.

It's not the past if it's not finished.

I don't say anything. I know the power of silence. I remember my dad saying nothing and I remember his silences more vividly than I remember the things he said.

You don't lose a person all at once. You lose them in parts.

She thinks she's so smart but if you erase an hour, it doesn't mean shit, not unless you erase the weeks leading up to that hour.

I go over the mistake in my head a dozen times a day. How I was hiding in a closet upstairs at the Salinger house. How I had to pee but couldn't leave. So I pissed in a mug—a ceramic mug—and I put the mug down on the hardwood floor of the closet. I ran when I had the chance, and there is no way around it: I forgot the mug.

I scroll through my own stories in my phone, the ones I write when I can't sleep, when I think about her, about what the fuck happened, when I make like Alvy Singer and try to correct it all with my imagination.

The most romantic time of my life was a hoax

But, know this, Beck: Every day I find a way to visit the pictures of you in my phone. I'm faithful.

Why can't I remember our family Christmas, or a warm spring day, or anything that might have been pleasant? It is as though the filter of recall is itself altered, so that it blocks out everything but the darkest colors of the spectrum.

Memory is faithless, like a cheating lover, telling you what you believe is true.

Over the years I've come to think of memories as tiny living things, microorganisms that swim through the brain until they've found the right compartment in which to settle down and rest. If the compartment isn't available, if there's no proper label for the memory, it takes up residence somewhere else, gets lodged in a corner and gnaws at you periodically, cropping up at odd times, or in dreams.

Why doesn't he get over it already? But that was the secret, wasn't it? You never got over what you lost. You always carried it with you, stitched to you like Peter Pan's shadow. And you never wanted to get over it, because who wanted to forget a time that had been so important? No, the truth was, you wanted to remember it always.

Maybe love didn't die even when a person did, but that didn't mean there might not be room for someone else in your heart.

I live alongside it. Auschwitz is there, unalterable, precise, but enveloped in the skin of memory.' (Moorehead, 2011, 316)

Looking at me, one would think that I'm alive…I'm not alive. I died in Auschwitz, but no one knows it'. (Moorehead, 2011, 317)