Quotes About Recollection

I don't trust memory, anyway. Why should I? Memories, however undependable, ought to be the stuff on the sand when the tides of experience recedes. As long as they're part of that process, there's something valid about them, something that ties them to real life.

And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarified nothing.

Remembering is mental time travel.

I put it in my hat to remember to post it,' she explained, 'but I forgot, so it came with me today still in my hat.

is not Watzisname,' said Watzisname, patiently. 'I have told

everyone called him "Watzisname",' said Beth to

Are you saying that you people knew about these amorophobots all the time? Of course we did. They attacked us in Iceland. Remember? No. I was unconscious.

Ik herinner me hem wel, Holly. Ik herinner het me allemaal. Vooral jou. Het is een hele troost dat jij hier bij me bent.' … 'Dat is heel lief van je, Artemis,' zei ze na even te hebben nagedacht. 'Maar je hoeft voor mij niet te doen alsof.

Ik weet het nog goed,' begon Wurm melodramatisch. 'Het was een donkere nacht.

Kreb vergisst nie die Friedhöfe, wo er beerdigt worden ist.

It's funny how sometimes the people we remember the least make the greatest impression on us.

Do you," he murmured, "do you have any - Smarties? You brought some once, I remember, in a tube with a lid on. They were small, and many-coloured - all different colors - and they tasted very good.

How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a cupboard, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?

People like my grandmother, who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection.

The nostalgia I had come to treasure was a hypertrophied sense of the past as a place, a place with street signs and a figure atop a staircase that I recognized.

S]overeign power is nothing if it does not care for the welfare of others, and . . . it is the task of a good ruler to keep his power in check, to resist the passions of unbridled desire and implacable rage, and to realize that, as the dictator Caesar used to say, the recollection of past cruelty is a wretched provision for old age.

He could not wait to get rid of them so he could enjoy remembering them.

but Mackey and Kell had asked Stevie straight out if any of his male relatives had the last name Jefferson, and he couldn't think of one.

John had forgotten her name as soon as she said it—it might as well be Charon for all he could remember),

Memory feeds imagination.

I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.

You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

I climb to the very top step and look behind me at the wall of memories. Who are we in the end? A collection of photos? How do we know what is truly lived if we cannot remember it?