Quotes About Memory

Cassie," I said, "we've been through this. Once more, with feeling: I remember sweet shining fuck-all.

In all your life, only a few moments matter. Mostly you never get a good look at them except in hindsight, long after they've zipped past you:

Lexie Madison developed out of nothing like a Polaroid, she curled off the page and hung in the air like incense smoke, a girl with my face and a life from a half-forgotten dream.

She smelled of sweet safe things I hadn't smelt in years,

The Place would already have started the leisurely, enjoyable process of digesting her into just one more piece of local gore-lore, half ghost story and half morality play, half urban myth and half just the way life goes. It would eat her memory whole, the same way its ground had eaten her body.

memories are nothing, soft as gauze against the ruthless razor-fineness of that edge, beautiful and lethal, one tiny slip and it'll slice to the bone. It

Most people have no reason to know how memory can turn rogue and feral, becoming a force of its own and one to be reckoned with.

but all it takes is one whiff of the right smell—jasmine, lapsang souchong, a specific old-fashioned soap that I've never been able to identify—or one sideways shaft of afternoon light at a particular angle, and I'm lost, in thrall all over again.

There's no password more powerful than your past.

Daniel glanced up from his book. "No pasts," he said. The fall of it, the finality, told me it was something he had said before.

Frank has a childhood memory of Ma "screeching at Jackie for being such a bold girl that her da had to go to the pub because he couldn't stand to be around her.

It looked vaguely, frustratingly familiar, but I couldn't tell whether this was because I actually remembered it or because I knew I should.

I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia

his memory was banjaxed,

I could no longer picture Rosalind in my mind's eye; the tender vision of the girl in white had been blown to pieces as if by a nuclear bomb. This was something unimaginable, something hollow as the yellowed husks that insects leave behind in dry grass, blowing with cold alien winds and a fine corrosive dust that shredded everything it touched.

I had come to think of my memories as solid, shining little tings, to be hunted out and treasured, and it was deeply unsettling to think that they might be fool's gold, tricky and fog-shaped and not at all what they seemed.

The moment I said Broken Harbor to O'Kelly, every faded scar in my mind had lit up like a beacon. I had walked the glittering lines of those scars, obedient as a farm animal, from that moment straight to this one. I had moved through this case shining like Conor Brennan had shone on that dark road, a blazing signal for predators and scavengers far and wide.

I looked out over the water, into the night that was coming in on the tide, and I felt nothing at all. The beach looked like something I had seen in an old film, once upon a time; that hotheaded boy felt like a character from some book I had read and given away in childhood. Only, somewhere far inside my spine and deep in the palms of my hands, something hummed; like a sound too low to hear, like a warning, like a cello string when a tuning fork strikes the perfect tone to call it awake.

Chris had cracked the four of them right across. Even after he was gone, the fault line he made had kept widening, deep under the surface, while everything up on top shone beautiful as new. We were just finishing the job he had begun.

When I think about the Spain case, from deep inside endless nights, this is the moment I remember. Everything else, every other slip and stumble along the way, could have been redeemed. This is the one I clench tight because of how sharp it slices. Cold still air, a weak ray of sun glowing on the wall outside the window, smell of stale bread and apples.

I don't think about my parents much. I've only got a handful of memories, and I don't want them wearing away, textures rubbing smooth, colors fading from overexposure. When I take them out, once in a blue moon, I need them bright enough to catch my breath and sharp enough to cut.

When he goes weak is when she takes him by surprise like this, on an innocent fall morning, blooming right across his mind so fresh and vivid that he can almost smell her. He can't remember why he shouldn't pull out his phone, Hey, baby, listen to this. Probably he should delete her number, but they might need to talk about Alyssa sometime, and anyway he knows it by heart.

People who were gone only lived on in your memory if you had memories. Why hadn't she held on tighter?

If the amygdala recognizes an emotionally potent stimulus similar to something we reacted strongly to in the past, it unleashes a flood of emotion and a fitting action.