Quotes About Memories

You keep it," he said.

My brother wrote another refrigerator magnet poem, when he was probably nineteen or twenty: 'When the flood comes/ I will swim to a symphony/ go by boat to some picture show/ and maybe I will forget about you.' How did he know way, way back then? How is it I know only now?

Part of his strong attraction to Kathy Lingg had been her little daughter. He'd videotaped the child visiting Disneyland and opening Christmas presents.

Each of us wore our memories of what might have been.

Goodbye Curly. I'll see you next summer. Keep out of trouble, now, until I come back.

In time, your spirit will be with them again, perhaps in a great, spreading tree that shades the place where your grandchildren play. Maybe in a wide-winged eagle soaring aloft, watching as your dear one spreads her linen on the hawthorns to dry and looks suddenly to the sky, shading her eyes against the sunlight. You will be there, and they will know.

It is surely better to have had such a love and lost it than never to have known the joy of it at all.

The dark things that never go away, the sunny, precious things that go all too soon.

She was gone. We all knew it. But nobody moved. Nobody spoke. Still my father held her tight in his arms, as if he might preserve that last moment of life, as long as he stayed completely still. His lips were against her hair, and his eyes were closed.

She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.

Cobbles are enormously evocative, like the scent of forgotten objects and remembered melodies.

I had a terribly bad aftertaste. Just making my face look as if it were new, with my memories and my habits unchanged, was quite like dipping up water with a bottomless dipper. Since I had put a mask over my face, I needed one that would fit my heart. If possible, I wanted to be so perfect in my inventions and my acting as to be undetectable even by a lie detector.

Eines Tages«, sagte sie, »fange ich Träume ein wie Schmetterlinge.« »Und dann?«, fragte er. »Lege ich sie zwischen die Seiten dicker Bücher und presse sie zu Worten.« »Was, wenn jemand immer nur von dir träumt?« »Dann sind wir beide vielleicht schon Worte in einem Buch. Zwei Namen zwischen all den anderen.«

Wären wir Narben, dann wären unsere Erinnerungen die Fäden, die uns zusammenhalten. Du kannst sie nicht zerschneiden. Wenn du das tust, dann reißt es dich entzwei. Aber meine Erinnerungen tun so weh, sagte sie, Ich will vergessen. So vieles einfach vergessen. Wie soll das gehen? Alles, was dir im Leben geschehen ist, geschieht auch heute noch. Was einmal begonnen hat, endet nicht. Da oben in deinem Kopf, da endet es nie.

Still, we often talked on the farm of the Safaris that we had been on. Camping places fix themselves in your mind as if you had spent long periods of your life in them. You will remember a curve of your wagon track in the grass of the plain, like the features of a friend.

One day I sold my table-glass, and then in the night thought better of it, so that in the morning I drove to Nairobi and asked the lady who had bought it to call off the deal. I had no place to put the glass, but the fingers and lips of many friends had touched it, they had given me excellent wine to drink out of it; it was keeping an echo of old table-talk, and I did not want to part with it. After all, I thought, it would be an easy thing to break.

As I reach my thirtieth year of service as a butler in a gentleman's household, I find myself looking back. Between my secret recipe for boot blacking (an indispensable tool for a butler), and a vastly superior method to remove wine stains from velvet (which some will erroneously hold to be an impossibility), I find my memories salted with some faint wisdoms, a few tested experiences, and many, many interesting stories.

As Dougal ushered them into the dining room, he wondered if Sophia's father and her grandfather would both wish to stay at MacFarlane House with them. But as he looked into Sophia's smiling eyes, he realized it didn't matter. So long as she was by his side, life would be a grand adventure. And no man could ask for more.

Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. We speak to people who have vanished and, when they answer us, they do the same. Naturally, the information in these speeches is garbled in the translation.

IN EVERYONE'S LIFE there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken away against their will.

One Mother's Day, he gave Mom a music box that played the theme from Swan Lake. She cried for days over it.

We used to believe that memories were best retrieved in the same place that they were first laid down. Like everything else we think we know, that's not so clear anymore.

I felt her loss in a powerfully physical way. I missed her smell and the sticky wet of her breath on my neck. I missed her fingers scratching through my hair. We sat next to each other, lay across each other, pushed, pulled, stroked, and struck each other a hundred times a day and I suffered the deprivation of this. It was an ache, a hunger on the surface of my skin.

Memories of her, however, would remain with him. Everywhere he'd look, she would be there, as if she were a hundred women, all shadow and wraith, marking each place at Tyemorn and Ayleshire. He'd see her on the village road, smiling beneath an oak, straddling a furrow and laughing at something a companion had said. There again, tilting her head in an inquisitive look and offering advice on the line of the barn wall, or at night, when he could only see the outline of her form.