Quotes About Memories

Time doesn't fly, it steals. Like some skilled pickpocket or magician, it gets you to look the other way and when you do, it ruthlessly steals your essential things—memories, great moments that end much too soon, the lives of those you love. It knows how to trick you and then steal you blind.

In the end, each of us has only one story to tell. It takes a lifetime to live that story but sometimes less than an hour to tell it. The

When I was younger, I had a girlfriend. She was like a thousand-dollar perfume—unique, gorgeous, but then gone much too soon.

Listening to him, I realized how lucky I was not to have had a wonderful childhood. Those who do, or those who peak in their early years, have only that remembered joy or strength to tide them over the rest of their lives. Nothing could ever be as good as that time; for them nothing ever is.

For many weeks after [my wife] died, I could not get used to the feeling of coldness and lifelessness on her side of the bed - and it was even worse when they took the body away and buried her.

I'm one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.

Over the balustrade I could see the dark trees of Webster Groves and the more distant TV-tower lights that marked the boundaries of my childhood. A night wind coming across the football practice field carried the smell of thawed winter earth, the great sorrowful world-smell of being alive beneath a sky.

She'd visited the Continent five times on vacation and twice on business trips with Alfred, so about a dozen times altogether, and to friends planning tours of Spain or France she now liked to say, with a sigh, that she'd had her fill of the place.

How the hours can pass with mere kissing is lost to me now, along with the rest of my youth.

Watching him fall down and pick himself back up, Perry mourned no longer being small enough that falling didn't hurt. He no longer even remembered how it felt to have the ground so unthreateningly proximate. Why had he been in such a hurry to grow up? It was as if he'd never experienced the grace of childhood.

And the posture of the older oak trees reaching toward this sky had a jut, a wildness and entitlement, predating permanent settlement; memories of an unfenced world were written in the cursive of their branches.

There are certain grudges that are every bit as irrational as they are uplifting. A person must protect them at all costs, especially in old age.

Mother died when he was twelve. He did not want sympathy, he only wanted her back.

It's hard to say goodbye to the place you've lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.

I loved having a dad who was smarter than the New York Times , and I loved how my cheek could feel the hairs on his chest through his T-shirt, and how he always smelled like shaving, even at the end of the day. Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing.

The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.

I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.

Memories are small prayers to God, if we believed in that sort of thing.

Years were passing through the spaces between moments.

Grandfather kicked the stop pedal, and my face gave a high-five to the front window.

She took the posters downtown that afternoon. She filled a rolling suitcase with them ... she took a stapler. And a box of staples. And hope. I think of those things. The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape, the hope. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and hop.

So many days in their shared life. So many experiences. How had they managed to spend the previous sixteen years unlearning each other?

I put my hands into the pockets of all his jackets

I understand, now, the tragedy of my childhood. It wasn't the bombing. It was that I never once liked a photograph of myself. I couldn't.