Quotes About Memory

Later he couldn't even remember who was the one who had come up with the life-saving (or so he thought then) idea of inventing shared memories, to make up a whole life together before and after their meeting. A pathetic attempt to take revenge on merciless chance that had brought them together, only to separate them.

If no one remembers becomes the equivalent of If there is no God. If there is no God, Dostoyevsky said, then everything is permitted.

If the destination was a broken heart, at least she would always have the memory of the journey.

My first memory is of light -- the brightness of light -- light all around.

When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me-some of them more than sixty years ago-I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives. If the person in the photographs were living in this world today, she would be quite a different person-but it doesn't matter-Stieglitz photographed her then.

I wish so much to go that I almost wish I had never been there.

I realize I must be different than when I came out [to Ghost Ranch], but it seems so long ago that I can't remember what I was like---so I can't lapse back to it---I can only be as I am---and I feel terribly alive---

He was wearing a blue cotton shirt that was bleached and faded to the colour of a forget-me-not dried by the sun, and old grey flannel trousers.

Theodore had an apparently inexhaustible fund of knowledge about everything, but he imparted this knowledge with a sort of meticulous diffidence that made you feel he was not so much teaching you something new, as reminding you of something which you were already aware of, but which had, for some reason or other, slipped your mind.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't even there. — George Santanaya As

The active night of the spirit is characterized by similar disciplines and restraints applied to the intellect, memory, will, and imagination. John's primary example here is of practicing the virtues. He says that the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) are instrumental in freeing the spirit from its attachments. Faith darkens and empties the intellect, hope frees the memory, and love liberates the will.

imagination in looking to the future. Memory is the ground of dreaming.

Yes, they were part of him. He hoped he was a little part of them--if only a memory, a fraction of their consciousness. How the Sweeney's of the world needed them. He blinked fiercely, stemming his tears. I am not much of a man, but at least I have known them.

I did not get over the loss of my loved ones; rather, I absorbed the loss into my life, like soil receives decaying matter, until it became a part of who I am.

What you don't know may not hurt you, but what you don't remember always does.

Gabito would say later that he had no memory of his mother. She had left him before he could retain any memories at all.

Dipping into the pitcher of the past, his father often said, can only sour the cup of the present.

To forgive or forget the crimes of Josef Mengele would require the amputation of our conscience and the dismemberment of our memory.

Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what happened, but of what men believe happened.

My Tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint. Because they have been such a little time with us, they seem to hold to life but weakly. I used to wonder if it was so because the memory of Heaven still lived within them, so that in leaving here they do not fear death as we do, who no longer know with certainty where it is our spirits go. This, I thought, must be the kindness that God does for them and for us, since He gives so many infants such a little while to bide with us.

I asked once, and the library assistant told me there were more than a hundred thousand books there, and more than sixty million pages of documents. It's a good number, I think: ten pages for every person who died. A kind of monument in paper for people who have no gravestones.

It is natural to want to forget, Anna, when everyday is a brimful of sadness. But those souls also forgot those that they had loved. You do not want that, surely? I have heard some preach that God wants us to forget the dead, but I cannot believe so. I think He gives us precious recollections so that we may not be parted entirely from those He has given us to love. You must cherish your memories of your babes, Anna, until you see them again in Heaven.

How was it that he could remember not remembering, and yet the fugitive facts themselves remained so elusive? How could he misplace the skills of a lifetime? Where did such knowledge go?

So this was how it was to be, now: I would do my best to live in the quick world, but the ghosts of the dead would be ever at hand.