memories Quotes

“I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.”

“What happens in a certain place can stain your feelings for that location, just as ink can stain a white sheet. You can wash it, and wash it, and still never forget what has transpired - a word which here means ‘happened, and made everybody sad’.”

“There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.”

“I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things.”

“Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.”

“Memories mean more to me than dresses.”

“He was prisoned in thought. Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away.”

They were eyes no longer, but had become those fathomless mirrors which in men who have known the depths of suffering may replace the conscious gaze, so that they no longer see reality but reflect the memory of past events.

“There’s much more. There’s all that goes beyond – all ... that is Elsewhere – and all that goes back, and back, and back. I received all of those, when I was selected. And here in this room, all alone, I re-experience them again and again. It is how wisdom comes. And how we shape our future.”

“It’s just that... without the memories it’s all meaningless.”

“I may not remember my name or what country I live in, but you and that pie is something I will never forget.”

“But why can’t everyone have the memories? I think it would seem a little easier if the memories were shared. You and I wouldn’t have to bear so much by ourselves, if everybody took a part.” The Giver sighed. “You’re right,” he said. “But then everyone would be burdened and pained. They don’t want that. And that’s the real reason The Receiver is so vital to them, and so honored. They selected me - and you - to lift that burden from themselves.”

“No one tells us, girls who don’t go on dates, that remembering can be almost as good as what actually happens.”

“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”

“If you were to be lost in the river, Jonas, your memories would not be lost with you. Memories are forever.”

“I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar.”

“Perhaps--I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears.”

“When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”

“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”

“‘Are you possessed with a devil,’ he pursued, savagely, ‘to talk in that manner to me when you are dying? Do you reflect that all those words will be branded in my memory, and eating deeper eternally after you have left me?‘”

“The things that go wrong often make the best memories.”

“People have an annoying habit of remembering things they shouldn’t.”

“I will never, ever regret the things I’ve done. Because most days, if you’re stuck in one of these, all you have are places in your memory that you can go to.”

“There was a pause, then more words appeared—words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them. *You were my child. I should have protected you.* I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.”

“It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it’s great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you.”

“All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family.”

“He was conscious of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, long, forgotten!”

“Remember my friend, that knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the weaker.”

“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”

“If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.”

The pieces were placed in a fire under the copper, and they quickly blazed up brightly, while the tree sighed so deeply that each sigh was like a pistol-shot. Then the children, who were at play, came and seated themselves in front of the fire, and looked at it and cried, “Pop, pop.” But at each “pop,” which was a deep sigh, the tree was thinking of a summer day in the forest; and of Christmas evening, and of “Humpty Dumpty,” the only story it had ever heard or knew how to relate, till at last it was consumed.

“It’s strange indeed how memories can lie dormant in a man’s mind for so many years. Yet those memories can be awakened and brought forth fresh and new, just by something you’ve seen, or something you’ve heard, or the sight of an old familiar face.”

“I’d like to take a walk far back in the flinty hills and search for a souvenir, an old double-bitted ax stuck deep in the side of a white oak tree. I know the handle has long since rotted away with time. Perhaps the rusty frame of a coal-oil lantern still hangs there on the blade.”

“She paused, as though she were remembering events that happened hundreds of years before that time.”

“That which I have seen, in that little moment, will never go out from my memory, but will abide there; and I shall see it all the days, and dream of it all the nights, till I die. Would God I had been blind!”

For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.

“Noah has fallen in love with the new Allie, not her memory, but then he had never really stopped, and this he realizes, is his destiny.”

“...she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by.”

“The things we do outlast our mortality. The things we do are like monuments that people build to honor heroes after they’ve died. They’re like the pyramids that the Egyptians built to honor the pharaohs. Only instead of being made of stone, they’re made out of the memories people have of you.”

“But do not despise the lore that has come down from distant years; for oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know.”

“Thank you for coming into my life and giving me joy, thank you for loving me and receiving my love in return. Thank you for the memories I will cherish forever. But most of all, thank you for showing me that there will come a time when I can eventually let you go. ”

“Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

“When I was a boy my grandfather died....He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”

“Truly precious memories will never vanish even if you discard the objects associated with them . . . No matter how wonderful things used to be, we cannot live in the past. The joy and excitement we feel here and now are more important . . . Does this spark joy?”

“As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on—in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.”

“I find it very difficult to let a friend or beloved go into that country of no return. I answer the heroic question, “Death, where is thy sting?” with “It is here in my heart, and my mind, and my memories.”

“Esperanza bent closer to look at the stems rooted in mulch [...] Now, if they bloomed she could drink the memories of the roses that had known Papa.”

“It was, I remembered thinking, the most difficult walk anyone had to make. In every way, a walk to remember.”

“And the more I thought about it, the more I dug out my memory things I had overlooked or forgotten. I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored. In a way, it was an advantage.”

“In front of God and everyone else, I’d promised my love and devotion. In sickness and in health, and I’d never felt so good about anything. It was, I remember, the most wonderful moment of my life.”

“I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn’t mine anymore, but one in which I’d found the simplest and most lasting joys.”

“Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them. In the process they plastically retranscribe these procedural memories, so that they become conscious explicit memories, sometimes for the first time, and patients no longer need to “relive” or “reenact” them, especially if they were traumatic.”

“The Pants were the only witness to all our lives. They were the witness and the document too.”

“The Pants had absorbed the summer. Maybe it was better that they couldn’t talk. They would let us remember more how we had felt, and less what had actually happened.”

What had once seemed shallow and tedious now loomed in memory like paradise.

“There is a beast in my gut, I can hear it scraping away at my ribs. Even if I dump the memory, it will stay with me, staining me.”

″...she was a woman with a million happy memories, who knew what it was like to experience true love and who was ready to experience more life, more love and make new memories.”

“If it was from him she would be faced with the same future but at least she could hold on to a fresh memory. A memory that would have to last her a lifetime.”

″... I am just a chapter in your life, there will be many more. Remember our wonderful memories, but please don’t be afraid to make some more.”

“Or maybe I’m remembering it wrong.”

“You know Harry, in a way you did see your father last night... You found him inside yourself.”

“My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that’s all I remember.”

“I don’t need to worry that Finch and I never filmed our wanderings. It’s okay that we didn’t collect souvenirs or that we never had time to pull it all together in a way that made sense to anyone else but us. The thing I realize is that it’s not what you take, but it’s what you leave.”

“Maybe, if I wear the glasses long enough, I can be like her. I can see what she saw. I can be both of us at once so no one will have to miss her, most of all me.”

“There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.”

“The Counsellor, who was present, had prepared an answer, and had resolved to resume all I had said, according to the formality of a debate, in which things are generally repeated more faithfully than they are answered, as if the chief trial to be made were of men’s memories.”

“The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it. Some shady trees leaned over it, and rushes and water-lilies grew at the deep end. Over the hedge on one side we looked into a plowed field, and on the other we looked over a gate at our master’s house, which stood by the roadside; at the top of the meadow was a grove of fir trees, and at the bottom a running brook overhung by a steep bank.”

“They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak.”

“At the end, we are all the same, just a body with only our actions and others’ memories to define who we are.”

“He chuckled at the memory, and then, in the instant, tears were burning in his eyes and rolling down his cheeks. That was always the way of grief: laughter and tears, joy and sorrow.”

“I did not want to find her aged and broken; I really dreaded it. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”

“As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent to me, her identity stronger. She was there, in the full vigor of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me, speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well.”

“But if thou live, remember’d not to be, Die single and thine image dies with thee.”

“There were no troublesome memories in his childish sleep; no token came to him of his brave days at college, of the glittering years when he flustered the hearts of many girls. There were only the white, safe walls of his crib and Nana and a man who came to see him sometimes, and a great big orange ball that Nana pointed at just before his twilight bed hour and called “sun.” When the sun went his eyes were sleepy – there were no dreams, no dreams to haunt him.”

“It was during this period that he might have hearkened to the memories of the lair and the stream and run back to the Wild. But the memory of his mother held him...So he remained in his bondage waiting for her.”

″‘You are young,’ replied Athos, ‘and your bitter recollections have time to be changed into sweet remembrances.‘”

“I certainly do know heaps of stories, but I learned most of them from Gramps. Gram suggested I tell one about my mother. That I could not do. I had just reached the point where I could stop thinking about her every minute of every day.”

″‘Hide them. Keep them safe for me,’ I said, putting my hands on top of his. ‘I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t want them to be destroyed. There’s so much of me, of all of us, in these drawings.‘”

“Smells and sounds I’d grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it, but that was one of the last memories she had of me, and I wished I could take it back.”

“I won’t be a carer any more come the end of the year, and though I’ve got a lot out of it, I have to admit I’ll welcome the chance to rest—to stop and think and remember. I’m sure it’s at least partly to do with that, to do with preparing for the change of pace, that I’ve been getting this urge to order all these old memories.”

“I was talking to one of my donors a few days ago who was complaining about how memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t see them ever fading.”

“I closed my eyes and tried to think of something, anything, to calm myself. I pictured my sketchbook. I felt my hands stir. Images, like celluloid frames, rolled through my mind.”

“Gramps always ends this story by saying, “That bed has been around my whole life, and I’m going to die in that bed, and then that bed will know everything there is to know about me.”″

“By the time I was two, all my memories had words, and all my words had meanings. But only in my head. I have never spoken one single word.”

“For the majority of people, once the immediate posttrauma period has passed, memories of the trauma are not much more intrusive or memorable than any other memories. Time really can heal.”

“It is my greatest hope that the pages in this jar stir your deepest well of human compassion. I hope they prompt you to do something, to tell someone. Only then can we ensure that this kind of evil is never allowed to repeat itself.”

“At most, I could allow myself only a few minutes to cry for him—to grieve our lives, and then I had to push the memories away, burying them deep inside of me once again so that I could function. So that I could go on.”

“Avoidance occurs on two levels. On the first level, there is an emotional avoidance of all distressing memories, thoughts, and feelings about the trauma. On the second, there is a behavioral avoidance of the people, places, conversations, activities, objects, and situations that cause those distressing trauma-related memories, thoughts, or feelings.”

“He was one of the most honorable men I have ever known.”

“I thought I’d scared you off it. How’s our haunted mansion faring these days? Still standing?”

“My grandfather was the only member of his family to escape Poland before the Second World War broke out.”

“I thought about it, looking at the pictures and then at my grandfather, his face so earnest and open. What reason would he have to lie?”

“I won’t have the time, so you’ll have to do it. Just write it all down like you’re talking. Put in all the fun we had, the cool things we did. Our adventures.”

“Alone, abandoned by his premonitions, fleeing the chill that was to accompany him until death, he sought a last refuge in Macondo in the warmth of his oldest memories. ”

″[B]ut what pained her most and enraged her most and made her most bitter was the fragrant and wormy guava grove of love that was dragging her toward death. Just as Colonel Aureliano Buendía thought about his war, unable to avoid it, so Amaranta thought about Rebeca. But while her brother had managed to sterilize his memories, she had only managed to make hers more scalding.”

“Úrsula, on the other hand, who had suffered through a process opposite to Amaranta’s, recalled Rebeca with a memory free of impurities, for the image of the pitiful child brought to the house with the bag containing her parents’ bones prevailed over the offense that had made her unworthy to be connected to the family tree any longer.”

“He could imagine some people thinking that he was walking to outpace the memories of the world he’d left behind...”

“But while the adversaries forgot the war to remember things of the past, Úrsula had the gloomy feeling that her son was an intruder. […] He was preserved against imminent old age by a vitality that had something to do with the coldness of his insides. He was taller than when he had left, paler and bonier, and he showed the first symptoms of resistance to nostalgia.”

“The only one who had not lost for a single minute the awareness that [Rebeca] was alive and rotting in her wormhole was the implacable and aging Amaranta. […]Always, at every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought about Rebeca because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones.”

“Except later it was Freak who taught me that remembering is a great invention of the mind, and if you try hard enough you can remember anything, whether it happened or not.”

“Your heart will fix itself. It’s your mind you need to worry about. Your mind where you locked the memories, your mind where you have kept pieces of the ones that hurt you, that still cut through you like shards of glass. ”

“When asked what he recalls of his first six years, Michael said, ‘Going for days having to drink water to get full. Going to other people’s houses and asking for something to eat. Sleeping outside. The mosquitoes.‘”

“I don’t want to be one of those easily forgotten people, so important at the time, so special, so influential, and so treasured, yet years later just a vague face and a distant memory.”

“Time’s the thief of memory.”

“I close my eyes and let the darkness grow and spread until it morphs from a feeling of sadness into something worse: a memory, a flashback.”

“We’re here, you know ... All the time. You can talk to us and think about us. It doesn’t have to be sad or scary.”

“I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found how to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.”

“He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of my death, and afterwards he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass.”

“They understood that I had to be away from the places that held the memories of my friend.”

“If I turned right here I’d go up past my gallery—what was my gallery, now a vacant shop window—but I don’t want to, because that still hurts a little.”

“When I saw him many things I thought I had forgotten came flooding back to me. This was because I had begun, finally, to wonder about Sonny, about the life that Sonny lived inside.”

“At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to paint, photograph or even remember it. It is enough.”

“For he isn’t the Cat that he was in his prime; Though his name was quite famous, he says, in his time. And whenever he joins his friends at their club (which takes place at the back of the neighboring pub) He loves to regale them, if someone else pays, With anecdotes drawn from his palmiest days. For he once was a Star of the highest degree — He has acted with Irving, he’s acted with Tree.”

“Everything is gorgeous once it’s gone. ”

“Some are too much brutalized by slavery to feel the humiliation of their position; but many slaves feel it most acutely, and shrink from the memory of it.”

“The man’s face and body told the story more eloquently than his words: pain-haunted eyes, shaking hands that could not forget.”

“Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time.”

“And with each sip, he remembered his family passing the bottles from hand to hand, laughing at the tickly bubbles, sharing and laughing together.”

“As individuals each of us is extremely isolated, while ... all linked by a prototypical memory. ”

“If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.”

“What you remembered? Probably. More or less. Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.”

“That’s the trouble with living things. Don’t last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.”

“Lettie Hempstock’s ocean. I remembered that, and remembering that, I remembered everything.”

“I want to remember . . . Because it happened to me. And I’m still me.”

“But since thou canst not be my wife, at least thou shalt be my tree; my hair, my lyre, my quiver shall always have thee, oh laurel!”

“You have to churn somewhat when the roof covering your head is at stake, since to sell is to walk away from a cluster of memories and to buy is to choose where the future will take place.”

“Memory is, of course, a trickster.”

“Here it is. Here’s the love. Here’s the love: it’s in marriage and parenting. It’s in family and friends. It’s in sacrifice and forgiveness. It’s in dinner around the coffee table and long walks. It’s in the hands and faces of the people we see every day, in the whispers of our prayers and hymns and songs. It’s in our neighborhoods and churches, our classrooms and living rooms, on the water and in the stories we tell.And let me tell you where it’s not: it’s not in numbers—numbers in bank accounts, numbers on scales, numbers on report cards or credit scores.″

“The past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.”

“She wipes her memory instantly and with purpose; it’s a way of preserving herself.”

“I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday.”

“I don’t know what it is about food your mother makes for you, especially when it’s something that anyone can make - but it carries a certain taste of memory.”

“Most people seemed to have a hard outer shell that protected them from mean people, insults, bad memories.”

“But the memory changes you, right? It makes you a different person.”

“Oh, the dead! she murmured, one pitied them, one brushed them aside, one had even a little contempt for them. They are at our mercy.”

“A light was on in the kitchen. His mother sat at the kitchen table, as still as a statue. Her hands were clasped together, and she stared fixatedly at a small stain on the tablecloth. Gregor remembered seeing her that way so many nights after his dad had disappeared. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to scare her or shock her or ever give her any more pain. So, he stepped into the light of the kitchen and said the one thing he knew she wanted to hear most in the world. ‘Hey, Mom. We’re home.‘”

“When I was little, something as small as Mom picking me up ten minutes late threw me into a wild panic.”

“I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.”

“Both halves were there, in the bushes. I saved them as a kind of souvenir. At first, they reminded me that the night wasn’t a dream. As I got older, they reminded me of what mattered in life.”

“Somehow, long ago, my little kid’s brain had pasted together pieces of overheard conversations: When Mom was a teenager, I started making her belly fat.”″

“It’s important that you know. Our family memory must not be lost.”

“Their beautiful mother’s mouth, Estha thought. Ammu’s mouth. That had kissed his hand through the barred train window. First class, on the Madras Mail to Madras. ‘Bye Estha, Godbless, Ammu’s mouth had said. Ammu’s trying-not-to-cry mouth. The last time he had seen her.”

“Neither question nor answer was meant as anything more than a polite preamble to conversation. Both [Rahel] and [Comrade Pillai] knew that there are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot – that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways-staring eyes.”

“The thick warmth of his sleepy breath against my ear. If you have to go, I will go with you. My fears forgotten in the golden harbor of his arms. The memories come, and come. She listens, staring into the grain of the stone. We are all there, goddess and mortal and the boy who was both.”

“It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol [...] slowly faded, the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive.”

“Oh come on!” Chacko said. “You can’t dictate what she does with her own spit!” “Mind your own business,” Ammu snapped. “It brings back Memories,” Estha, in his wisdom, explained to Chacko.

“It’s important to capture things, you know? [...] Everything you see, you might be seeing for the last time.”

“When I was little my mother used to get a certain look in her eyes and say, ‘One day you’re going to fall in love.’ I wanted to say, but never said: Not in a million years.”

“I am a stranger in this church. Indeed, I have not been here since spring of 1692, so long ago now that it seems but a dim memory, and the girl I was at that time seems certainly like another person. Me and yet not me, that young girl. For she was as innocent to the dangers around her as my own baby daughter who now sleeps peacefully in my arms.”

“Mostly I thought of Mama. And when I first sat here, with my three-year-old boy beside me and the baby in my arms, it was Mama’s face I saw, Mama’s voice I heard, like it was yesterday.”

“Half my life I have waited to come home, and for what? Mocking and disregard? This was not the Pyke he remembered. Or did he remember? He had been so young when they took him away to hold hostage.”

“Then I knew we were getting to Grandma’s town. It was sound asleep in the hour before dawn. We slowed past the depot, and now we were coming to Grandma’s, the last house in town. It was lit up like a jack-o’-lantern.”

“I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. . . . I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. . . . I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of colored glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colors, like bits of a shattered rainbow. Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes. Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!”

“Hello boys and girls. Hannah Baker here. Live and in stereo. No return engagements, no encore, and this time absolutely no requests. I hope you’re ready, because I’m about to tell you the story of my life. More specifically, why it ended. And if you’re listening to these tapes, you’re one of the reasons why.”

“In Louis Creed’s memory that one moment always held a magical quality--partly, perhaps, because it really was magical, but mostly because the rest f the evening was so wild. In the next three hours, neither peace nor magic made an appearance.”

“I don’t think children ever forget the lies their parents tell them.”

“So they all went away from the little log house. The shutters were over the windows, so the little house could not see them go. It stayed there inside the log fence, behind the two big oak trees that in the summertime had made green roofs for Mary and Laura to play under. And that was the last of the little house.”

“I may be old, but I never forget my friends.”

″... but wouldn’t it have been more beautiful still, Anne, if there had been no separation or misunderstanding . . . if they had come hand in hand all the way through life, with no memories behind them but those which belonged to each other.”

“Her neck scars are a road map, too, aren’t they? Places she’s been best not to remember”

“Once she told me I looked like the sun to her, because of my hair. I asked her if I shined like the sun, and she told me, ‘No, Daddy, you shine more like the moon, when it’s dark outside.”

“But the mind is like a phantom that lives only in the past or future. Its only power over you is to draw your attention out of the present.”

“Robin was a great kid. Smarter than her father at eight years old. She liked the oddest things. Like the instructions for a toy more than the toy itself. The credits of a movie instead of the movie. The way something was written. An expression on my face.”

“And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”

“I remembered from my boyhood days in Texas a basic rule of firearms safety my father taught me: know your target and what is beyond it.”

“Curious how a place unvisited can take such hold on the mind so that the very name sets up a ringing.”

“People who have experienced a certain kind of pleasure in the past will try to repeat or relive it. The deepest-rooted and most pleasurable memories are usually those from earliest childhood, and are often unconsciously associated with a parental figure. ”

“Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.”

“Whenever clouds gathered and thunder rumbled, he cried out, perhaps remembering the showers of his native forests.”

“Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.”

“Memories can be vile, repulsive, little brutes. Like children I suppose. Haha. But can we live without them?”

“Memories are what our reason is based upon. If we can’t face them, we deny reason itself! Although, why not? We aren’t contractually tied down to rationality!”

“I remember the giants born so long ago; in those ancient days they raised me. I remember nine worlds, nine giantesses, and the seed from which Yggdrasil sprang.”

″‘If you take a book with you on a journey,’ Mo had said when he put the first one in her box, ‘an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it... yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.‘”

“For a moment, to Annemarie, listening, it seemed like all the earlier times, the happy visits to the farm in the past with summer daylight extending beyond bedtime, with the children tucked away in the bedrooms and the grownups downstairs talking.”

“If only I had not wondered about my sister Ulape, where she was, and if the marks she had drawn upon her cheeks had proved magical. If they had, she was now married to Nanko and was the mother of many children. She would have smiled to see all of mine, which were so different from the ones I always wished to have.”

“In the graveyard, no one ever changed. The little children Bod had played with when he was small were still children; Fortinbras Bartleby, who had once been his best friend, was not four or five years younger than Bod was, and they had less to talk about each time they saw each other; Thackeray Porringer was Bod’s height and age, and seemed to be in much better temper with him;...”

“I came to the mound where my ancestors had sometimes camped in the summer. I thought of them and of the happy times spent in my house on the headland, of my canoe lying unfinished beside the trail. I thought of many things, but stronger was the wish to be where people lived, to hear their voices and their laughter.”

“I have not always done the right thing. When I was younger...I did worse things than Jack. Worse than any of them. I was the monster, then, Bod, and worse than any monster.”

“Remembering home he suddenly became inward and didn’t want to say any more about all that. He dabbed flakes of croissant on to a finger-end and licked them away.”

“I’d never been to the Point […] Once Dazza and I decided we were going to do it. […] But then we started thinking about those stories they told in the front bar – wild Nungas with spears, boomerangs that come from nowhere and knock you senseless. We got scared and ran all the way back to the Port.”

“The wedding was lovely, the cake was delicious.”

“Last summer when Olivia was little, her mother showed her how to make sand castles.”

“I was real happy and carefree and young...”

“I’ll make you my papa’s special seaweed sandwich. He was a captain, too.”

“But my favorite was How Papa Got His Glass EYe. He’s always tell it different-- sometimes scary, sometimes sad, and once I laughed so hard I fell off his lap.”

“Now I never had ever had troubles before.”

“I remember the stars that night. They were like salt against the sky, like someone spilled the shaker against very dark cloth. That mattered to me, their accidental beauty.”

“I wrapped my fingers around the grip, placing them over Shawn’s prints like little brother holding big brother’s hand again, walking me to the store, teaching me how to do a Penny Drop.”

“Of course, weakness is strong. It’s the primary impulse. You’d probably prefer to sit in your little room and cry. Live in your finite collection of memories, carefully polishing each one. Half a life set behind glass and pinned to cardboard like a collection of exotic insects. You’d like to live behind that glass, wouldn’t you?”

“The children could look back and see their own car, green and lonely, in the middle of the parking lot. It was kind of like a home, the car, Dicey thought. She understood why Sammy wanted to stay there.”

“The odd thing was that, after he had entered the paint shop, he had felt as if a heavy wave of sadness had suddenly been lifted from out of him. Memories of her didn’t seem as painful as he had imagined.”

“The voice so filled with nostalgia that you could almost see the memories floating through the blue smoke, memories not only of music and joy and youth, but perhaps, of dreams. They listened to the music, each hearing it in his own way, feeling relaxed and a part of the music, a part of each other, and almost a part of the world. ”

“People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.”

“He remembers the page crumpled tightly in his fingers, the sudden shock of the lantern’s glare in his eyes. But for the first time he thinks of that moment not with terror, but with gratitude.”

“As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when by brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery.”

“When I got amnesia, I lost thirteen years of myself. I have to replace those memories using what I can pick up from other people. But everyone has a slightly different version of me—Mom, Dad, my friends, the kids at school, even frozen yogurt girl. For all I know, the lunch ladies know me better than anyone else. Who should I believe?”

“For eight years it had lain in their minds, and though they had given up speaking of it- people only laughed- they had always known the man, their friend, would come back. He has said one day they would know who he was.”

“It is necessary for you not to let pain rewrite your memories. And it’s absolutely necessary not to let pain ruin your future.”

“Objects tell us the stories of the people who held them.”

“You can’t fake yourself into being okay with what happened. But you can decide that the one who hurt you doesn’t get to decide what you do with your memories. Your life can be a graceful combination of beautiful and painful.”

“Early morning was the only time I felt as if there were ghosts nearby, memories of the weeks of fear. That’s when I found myself listening for Polly’s giggle or Grandfather’s voice. Sometimes they felt so close. Close enough to tell me I should stop dawdling and get to work.”

“From above, I felt someone hug my shoulders, I thought it was my father. I turned and became flushed with pride to find Mom holding me tightly. I could feel her heart beat. I never felt as safe and as warm as that moment in time, at the Russian River.”

“If memories change the pathways of the brain, then the trail must still be there. It’s just a matter of waiting for the wild things to emerge out of the understory.”

″‘Barrabas came to us by sea’, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterward, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own.”

″...he had to admit to himself that as time passed, his memories of that night grew less vivid, and he could no longer recall his mystery woman’s voice with perfect clarity. Besides, Sophie’s accent, while exceptionally refined for a housemaid, was not as uppercrust as hers had been.′

“And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.”

“Smell is important. It reminds a person of all the things he’s been through; it is a sheath of memories and security.”

“Once they had liked painting pictures with chemical fire, swimming in the canals in the seasons when the wine trees filled them with green liquors, and talking into the dawn together by the blue phosphorous portraits in the speaking room.”

“where do all the memories go, the ones we hide away with lock & key yet continue to shape us all the same?”

“No-Emperors may let their memories lie even more readily than poets and historians.”

“Relationships in life don’t really end, even if you never see the person again. Every person you’ve been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally)--all of them evoke memories, conscious or not.”

“People have long memories for such deeds in a great person.”

“Little bears have short memories and in a few days Bruce forgot all about ever being a giant of a bear. For all he knew Roxy’s flower garden was a beautiful leafy green forest with plenty of room to roam.”

“How the little things that mark a new departure stamp themselves indelibly on the memory!”

″‘If I die,’ I say as we look at the view, ‘I mean, when I die, throw my ashes in the water of the tiny beach. Then when you miss me, you can climb up here, look down, and think how awesome I was.‘”

“His eyes are a midnight moment filled with memories, the only windows into my world.”

“Before he’s completely gone, I reach out to grab a single petal and hold it tight against my chest. But somehow it slips through my fingers and vanishes into the sky. Just like the rest of him.”

″‘But I don’t think I can let him go.’ My mother nods silently... ‘Then you shouldn’t. You should keep him with you. Help him live on somehow.‘”

“She often remembered that building and wondered who owned it. Someone very kind she was sure for in front of every one of the many seats there had been a little carpet-eared puppy-sized dog-bed.”

“It’s a good time for the Moffats to be storing up memories, because things are changing.”

When the short days of winter came dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness.

Our path through life is strewn with many such sad memories: and were we to brood upon them always we could not find the heart to go on bravely with our work among the living.

“let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart.”

“I see France as it really is, because I look on it with the eyes of a woman; whereas my own country, which I can only judge of from the impression produced on my childish mind, always seems enveloped in a vague atmosphere, which is luminous or otherwise, according as my remembrances of it are sad or joyous.”