Quotes About Recollection

Y qué es, acaso, la memoria sino una gran mentira?

Sometimes, you think you have forgotten everything, that the rust and dust of the years have destroyed all the things we once entrusted to their voracious appetite. But all it takes is a noise, a smell, a sudden, unexpected touch, and suddenly the alluvion of time sweeps pitilessly over us, and our memories light up with all the brilliance and fury of a lightning flash

A veces, uno cree que todo lo ha olvidado, que el óxido y el polvo de los años han destruido ya completamente lo que, a su voracidad, un día confiamos. Pero basta un sonido, un olor, un tacto repentino e inesperado, para que, de repente, el aluvión del tiempo caiga sin compasión sobre nosotros y la memoria se ilumine con el brillo y la rabia de un relámpago. Aquella noche, además, el recuerdo estaba aún en carne viva.

A veces, uno cree que todo lo ha olvidado, que el óxido y el polvo de los años han destruido ya completamente lo que, a su voracidad, un día confiamos. Pero basta un sonido, un olor, un tacto repentino e inesperado, para que, de repente, el aluvión del tiempo caiga sin compasión sobre nosotros y la memoria se ilumine con el brillo y la rabia de un relámpago.

We remember with our emotions. The things that were important in our emotional life, that's what we remember.

and yet wasn't there something about [vampires] that struck a deep chord of recognition, even of memory? The teeth, the blood, the hunger, the immortal union with darkness -- what if these things weren't fantasy but recollection or even instinct, a feeling etched over eons into human DNA, of some dark power that lay within the human animal?

City of memories, city of mirrors.

But as with all such occurrences—those destined to be recounted not only in the immediate aftermath but for many years to come—time seemed compressed; it is a common error of memory to impose upon such events the coherence of a concentrated narrative, beginning with the assignment of a specific interval of time. That season. That year.

Why do certain arbitrary images stay with us, branded upon the walls of memory, while others sink forever into time's abyss?

Why did some images stay with us that way, he wondered, arbitrary flashes of life seared into memory, while others vanished without a trace?

Memories are tricky; there's what you remember, and what you think you remember, the editions and redactions of memory, the corrections and amendations and blundered readings and the whole apparatus criticus of the conscious mind trying to make bread out of soup.

He never makes notes, he just remembers it all, like a barmaid.

Forgetfulness is a form of freedom.

street, but he had forgotten the number of the house. He remembered only that it was a multiple of seven. "So we drove up and down the street," Kamen recalled, "and finally found Number 3528, a multiple of seven, all right. Thinking about it now, I wonder sometimes whether he wasn't pulling everybody's leg a little bit. . . . He had this overwhelming temptation just to snow you.

We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget.

You know me... If you are Iraqi, you know me.

When I was four years old, we lived in the Fiji islands, but I don't remember much.

I told Pedro this story: I used to wear a freakin' Pedro Martinez jersey because it had 'Martinez' on the back.

The faces you clutch at desperately slip away; it's when you're not thinking about them that their features flash past. It can happen on a street corner, at the turn of a staircase, because somebody said a word, because some image, an image has passed. Then the face is there for a split second, very fragile. One mustn't grasp at it, or it whisks away. One might as well try and catch a cloud. It was a cloud.

She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.

We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.

An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.

The only right memory, is the one that first comes to you.