Quotes About Memories

As the orchestra lifted into "Darling Nikki," I took small breaths to keep tears from coming. I had not expected this --to feel the close of a chapter. The girlhood of my life over now.

I held on to my mama's Spelman College sweater. Wore it the first day I got there myself and still have it now. Held on to my own daddy's stethoscope until I pulled it out of its black leather case one winter and saw the rubber had melted into sticky pieces of nothing and the silver disk was flaked with rust. Seems all I had from them was the memories of fire and smoke.

Some evenings I don't know where the old pains end and the new ones begin. Feels like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching.

Sometimes people don't get a chance to say good-bye, Stag.

They ate bologna-and-cheese sandwiches, barbecue potato chips, and Oreo cookies sitting on the library steps. Washing it down with Coca-Cola. Years later, Iris wouldn't remember what they talked about as they ate, but she'd remember CathyMarie's laughter, the shape and warmth of her calloused hands.

My brother drove me to the subway, kissed my forehead, and hugged me hard. When had he become a man? For so long, he had been my little brother, sweet and solemn, his eyes open wide to the world. Now, behind small wire-rimmed glasses, he looked like a figure out of history. Malcolm maybe. Or Stokely.

When you're young and your mother leaves, something inside of you fills up with the absence of her. I don't know how to explain. For a long time, there was this place inside of me where love for Marion should have been but wasn't.

In Tennessee, honeysuckle vines bloomed thick and full in our yard every summer. My brother and I ran out in the early hours, barefooted and still in pajamas to suck the sweetness from the bright flowers. It was never enough. That faint hint of honeysuckle on the tongue an almost broken promise of something better hidden somewhere deeper.

There's a strange sensation - you recall it from childhood - about sleeping in the afternoon. You rise into a different world from the one in which you lay down. The shadows have been rearranged. There's a sensation of sad sweetness, as if something has been overlooked. I used to feel it coming out of the movies just before dinnertime, after the matinee. How, I wondered, did Broadway actors face it, this bittersweet sense of time's slipping past.

Now I know that, when you lose a child, it's not the same as losing a contemporary, even a beloved husband or wife. When you lose a child, you grieve as a child grieves, which is to say, you grieve backward. You don't get better as time passes, you get worse. Time does not take you closer to acceptance, only further from the one you love.

I'll always remember our first night together, you so flushed and shy, me knowing what I know but scared too because you are the first one I loved. We poured our loneliness into each other and filled the emptiness and dark corners of this place with joy. I think of your long straight back, your strong legs, your hair on the pillow, your dark eyes close, and say your name over and over...it is the sound of bells.

A thin, firm, crackling ficelle (a skinny loaf of French bread) with a bar of dark chocolate works like a madeleine for me, taking me back to my youth and the French quatre heure, or small snack,

You can't escape the taste of the food you had as a child. In times of stress, what do you dream about? Your mother's clam chowder. It's security, comfort. It brings you home.

Et la mer efface sur le sable Les pas des amants désunis

I have never taken a picture for any other reason than that at that moment it made me happy to do so.

Nothing last forever, only the joy and happiness that turns into memories, turns eternal.(c)

He wouldn't charm her. She'd almost forgot what his kiss tasted like., felt like. She only remembered it when she drifted into dreams. Then it became so vivid, so real. To her mortification, she always felt a little thrill. Her life had been filled with gentlemen of the finest quality. James Sterling was like none of them, he was unpolished. A diamond in the rough. A scoundrel. A pirate.

I'll always be there, Anna, in every ship you see sailing past. I'll be the wind in its sail.

It reminds me of those carefree days in elementary school," Adam said, taking a sop of milk. "Where the only thing you worried about was being first on the swings, or being picked last for kickball.

I had begun to see the past like this: there is a line; you can draw it yourself, or sometimes it gets drawn for you; either way, there it is, your past, a collection of people you used to be

I loved very much - and so used to torment until she cried - a girl named Sonia.

In the past, the thought of being in my present situation had been a comfort, but now I did not even have this to look forward to, and so I lay down on my bed and dreamt I was eating a bowl of pink mullet and green figs cooked in coconut milk, and it had been cooked by my grandmother, which was why the taste of it pleased me so, for she was the person I liked best in all the world and those were the things I like best to eat also.

The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.

She drops the Happy Grenades when she dies. Tip