Quotes About Memories

the dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.

These are my memories of Norman: red earth and fireflies, singing and demonstrating on the Oval, reading Melville, Poe, Lenin and Mao Tse Tung, reading Ovid and Shakespeare on warm spring mornings with a favorite professor, of conservative political leaning, and accompanying another in the afternoons, singing revolutionary songs.

Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: Cody's in Berkeley, seven branch libraries in Philadelphia, twelve of the fourteen bookstores in Harvard Square, Harry W. Schwartz in Milwaukee and, in my own hometown of Washington, D.C., Olsson's and Chapters.

We were all victims of the arbitrary nature of a totalitarian regime that constantly intruded into the most private corners of our lives and imposed its relentless fictions on us. Was this rule the rule of Islam? What memories were we creating for our children? This constant assault, this persistent lack of kindness, was what frightened me most.

As I chewed on the gooey popcorn, looking out at the lake, calm and turquoise now, I tried to recall a more contented moment

What is a family? Is it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An ambit of love? A reach across the void?

And there was the time Paul McCartney serenaded my wife with "Michelle." She laughed, a little embarrassed, as the rest of the audience applauded, and I wondered what Michelle's parents would have said back in 1965, the year the song came out, if someone had knocked on the door of their South Side home and told them that someday the Beatle who wrote it would be singing it to their daughter from a White House stage.

We have our own ways, our own memories, and what has happened between all of us is hard to undo.

their minds were storing away a vision of life's possibilities and the beauty of the American landscape, just as mine once had; and that they might someday think back on our trips together and be reminded that they were so worthy of love, so fascinating and electric with life, that there was nothing their parents would rather do than share those vistas with them.

The mood on the plane was bittersweet.

Nobody ever tells you the truth about loss. You don't only lose someone you love, you lose a part of yourself as well. Your heart. Your humanity.

At the end of your life you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict, or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child or a parent.

At the end of your life, you will never regret winning one more verdict or earning one more paycheck. You WILL regret time not spent with a spouse, a friend or a loved one.

Maybe it wasn't about needing them. People hold on to all kinds of things, silly things, even broken things, because of the memories attached to them.

She wanted to go back, to clean it all up, to rewrite her story without all the dark parts, to unknow the things she knew, to unsee the things she'd seen, to live without her memories, her shame, her regret. And maybe that was a kind of atonement, after all. But none of those things were possible.

We're all a collection of our stories, chérie. Our joys and sorrows. Our loves and losses. That is who we are, a tally of all our agonies and ecstasies.

the very notion of personality, which is what we are trying to get at here, seems to have very limited application to me and quite possibly to everyone else. Self is another dodgy concept, since I am, when I subject this 'I' to careful inspection, not much more than a flickering of affinities, habits, memories, and predilections that could go either way- towards neediness or independence for example courage or cowardice.

Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.

I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them...

I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.

In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.

But time passed and eventually my mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it's going to fucking leave you and not come back.

It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant's afternoon? It was brief, I can promise that much, for although it's been many years now since my children ruled my life, a mother recalls the measure of the silences.