Memory Quotes - Page 16

The fact is that I hate this city. I've hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it.

Margaret Atwood

All of a sudden, images from every crime movie I'd ever seen began to pop into my mind—the windowless room, the harsh lights and narrow hallways, images which did not seem so much theatrical or foreign as imbued with the indelible quality of memory, of experience lived.

I lived here once," the author said after a moment."Here? For a long time?""No. For just a little while when I was young.""It must have been rather cramped.""I didn't notice.""Would you like to try it again?""No. And I couldn't if I wanted to."He shivered slightly and closed the windows. As they went downstairs, the visitor said, half apologetically: "It's really just like all houses, isn't it?"The author nodded."I didn't think it was when I built it, but in the end I suppose it's just like other houses after all.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I'd never known.

Memories of one's past are tainted. There are no truths to be found in them.

I wish nights like this weren't so fragile and slippery and impossible to nail down for study in one's leisure. But the really great nights pass through you like whispers or shadows. They shimmer, but don't adhere.

I can't remember what I really felt. Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions.

Margaret Atwood

Marina wouldn't want to be remembered because she dead. She would want to be remembered because she's good.

Memory was a slippery thing—slick moss on an unstable slope—and it was ever so easy to lose one’s footing and fall

Departure of a year welcomes so many new memories

We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places -- retreated to most often when we are most remote from them -- are among the most important landscapes we possess.

Robert Macfarlane

What was the exact percentage of this day that had already slipped away?

Tara Altebrando

People who were gone only lived on in your memory if you had memories. Why hadn't she held on tighter?

Tara Altebrando

Something weird moved through me, a feeling of familiarity, and as I stood in front of my locker, I found myself thinking of the one bright thing in a past full of shadows and darkness.I thought about the boy who made my chest hurt, the one who’d promised forever.It had been four years since I’d seen him or even heard him speak. Four years of trying to erase everything that had to do with that portion of my childhood, but I remembered him. I wondered about him.How could I not? I always would.He had been the sole reason I survived the house we’d grown up in.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

Celebrate the gift of memory.

This seems to me absolutely one of the quintessential things about the human condition. It’s what actually distinguishes man from any other animal: living with those who have lived and the companionship of those who are no longer alive. Not necessarily the people that one knew personally, I mean the people perhaps whom one only knows by what they did, or what they left behind, this question of the company of the past, that’s what interests me, and archives are a kind of site in the sense of like an archaeological site.

I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.

Marilynne Robinson

Life, he knew, had meaning and was fully possessed only as it was remembered and reshaped.

Your memories are like the air I breathe. I don't have to keep checking on it every now and then to make sure whether I am doing it or not. It happens all by itself. But the moment I try to stop it and hold it back forcefully, I start craving for it more and before I could even know I will be fighting to get more of it so that I could survive.

Once she was gone, every memory was suddenly precious, even the bad ones, even the times I was irritated with her, or she was irritated with me. Then it seemed a luxury to be irritated.

You broke the chain, Luna. Of all his victims, you were the only one that ever walked away and he hasn’t forgotten.

We ourselves, will resurrect the memory in order to savor it and carry it forth into the world. We will fling it at one another for laughs. Distort it. We will toss the story into the air at parties and howl over its ripeness. Degraded as it was, we will degrade it further. Make it more swollen. We shall render it impossibly awful, making of it the mythology of ourselves. A comfort. Proof of the trials we've survived.

Chuck Palahniuk

Just as he lived with them alive, he will live with them dead. Someday he will accept their death as part of his life. He will weep no more. He will carry them in his memory and his thoughts. His flesh and blood are part of them. So long as he is alive, they, too, will live in him. The big wave came, but it went away. The sun shines again, birds sing, and earth flowers.

We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember.

I write to prove that we lived. I write both to remember and to let go. I write because I can't stop, not until this horrible story of ours is over and we're safe at home.

Courtney M. Privett

The more emotional you are in a situation, the more memories you’ll have of that situation in the long run.

The whole composition reminds him of something he once had and that he isn't sure if he misses. He does and he doesn't at the same time. It is less the melancholy memory of an abscence and more the comforting evidence that it exists and is still part of the world.

you are on track, keep doin the things in your life that leaves the memories replenished, and with those things and the people who support a kind and just heart, life is short but oh yes it is remarkable to work at allowing it to be a part of this life I say this with our mutual love of friends and family..

levi paul taylor

Great moment, great memory.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Our most potent memories include the taste and smells of foods we enjoyed as a child in part because it reminds us of who fed us a meal.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Life is merely a series of moments and is in fact an unflinching serial killer, since it kills steadily each moment one after the other. Memory is the only survivor. (“Just for a moment”)

Erik Pevernagie

It is the touch of a lover's arms that I so desperately crave, not the memories of a love no longer mine.

I would far prefer to be in someone's arms than just in their head.

The first time he saw her she reminded him of a distant memory of falling from a height.

I pass a construction site, abandoned for the night, and a few blocks later, the playground of the elementary school my son attended, the metal sliding board gleaming under a streetlamp and the swings stirring in the breeze. There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead o me. It's the beautiful thing about youth.There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential. I love my life, but I haven't felt that lightness of being in ages. Autumn nights like this are as close as I get.

We are so afraid of being pulled under the water with the anchor. Scared of letting these memories swirl around our mind as they should. As tragic as it might feel, it’s evident that the sea we are drowning in is the same sea we were born into.

Trevor J. Freeman

The thing is, memory is about trust. We have to trust that what we remember is fact. And we have to trust what other people remember for things we never saw.

The power of collective memory does not lie in its accurate, systematic, or sophisticated mapping of the past, but in establishing basic images that articulate and reinforce a particular ideological stance.

[“What is the most real thing you can think of?”]Jacques thought for a long time before answering; he tried to weigh up what was most vital and enduring in all that he had known. Eventually, no longer smiling, he said, ‘Memory’.

Sebastian Faulks

I began keeping diaries after they locked Rosemary up at Butler and I went to live with Aunt Elaine in Cranston until I was eighteen, but even the diaries can't be trusted. For instance, there's a series of entries describing a trip to New Brunswick that I'm pretty sure I never took. It used to scare me, those recollections of things that never took place, but I've gotten used to it.

Caitlín R. Kiernan

There is magic just outside our memory.

Suzka

Violet unwrapped everything old as if it were a ribboned gift given to her by the Gods.

Suzka

My mother had a way of accessing the energy of the people around her. There was no need to know their name, who they were or how she knew them. She didn’t recognize their surface. She went much deeper.

Suzka

This woman had no idea who I was. She has no idea I was once a smoker, was thrown out of boarding school twice and a certified rebel with strong opinions. To her, I was new, fresh, immaculate to the bone. This was all strangely wonderful.

Suzka

The apparent is never the real.

Charles O. Slavens

Poetry is a hook for memory

After Abalyn said what she said, I panicked. Someone tells me I can't remember what I definitely do remember, and sometimes I panic. I'm not as used to it as I often pretend. As I pretend to be used to it, I mean to say. The false memories.

Caitlín R. Kiernan

These things were in the past now, many long years ago, though the memory remained as solid and present as his heartbeats. Time's passage had made the events seem almost crazed, hyper-real, stretched across a surreal dreamscape that felt more like a skjald's embellished saga than the intact past. Perhaps it had not happened like that. Perhaps the Lion had taken his Stormbirds to the Tyrant's fortress, and he himself had teleported in. Perhaps it had not been Ogvai there, but Gunn, or someone else. Had Bjorn been there too? It was a long time ago, so doubtful, but Bjorn seemed to always have been there, right from the start, just waiting for his time to come to maturity.

Without the mellifluous notes of memory, there would be no songs to sing, no ballads dedicated to past afflictions or affections, and no church hymns celebrating the trials and tribulations of saints, martyrs, and holy deities. Without respect for memories for days gone by, we would lack impetuses to write poems or produce literature reflecting the bitter hardships and ineffable joys of human life. Without a reference to the past serving as an ethical compass pointing the way forward, we would be oblivious to the inequities committed by foes and the glorious deeds performed by our ancestors; we would lack the essential evenhandedness required of every caretaker; and we would be poor stewards of this planet. The loss of memory severs us at the stem from one another. Without the bond of shared memories, we would each remain forever unconnected to our brothers and sisters. Without the twigs of memory, we would lead a life as dry and disjointed as withered leaves scattered by a cruel wind.

Kilroy J. Oldster

We came from some place and we are trending in a particular direction. Without memories, we do not know where we come from, and we cannot project our future trajectory. Without a keen awareness of our history, we cannot pose any meaningful hypothesis or engage in any useful speculation regarding the future of humankind. Without knowing where humankind came from and failing to contemplate where humankind is going, we could never touch upon a comprehensive understanding of the mythology and mystery of human nature. Such a spectacle would preclude us from comprehending what it truly means to be human. Melodious memories assist us to feel in our bones what being actually entails in its full aesthetic splendor.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Human beings are self-motivated. The two desires that spur human action are hunger and love. Without memory, humankind would no longer hunger for love.

Kilroy J. Oldster

This is not a lie: Memory has the taste and texture of cooked meat. Eat it and live. Remember, but only what it is licit to remember.In Aerograd, the word for meat and memory are the same.

Catherynne M. Valente

There can be no intellectual, spiritual, or emotional life without the substratum of memory. Without cognition and awareness of beauty and appreciation of our limited time on planet Earth, humankind’s sojourn would be a colorless collage composed of the base acts of a biological mass endeavoring merely to survive. Without the ability to recall striking memories, our emotional life would be stillborn. Absent authentic memories, our life struggles would seem purposeless: human beings would exhibit no capacity to reflect awe when witnessing the bounty of nature’s plenitude or be able to take in and express intense reverence for all that is sacred. Without memory, there would not be a dais to support faith or any ability to imagine a God; the concepts of good and evil would be nonexistent; and the past and the future would become less relevant than the choice between salt or pepper, and paper or plastic.

Kilroy J. Oldster

No person is more ruthlessly cheated than someone strip-mined of his or her ability to recall the vibrancy of the past. After all, what would any person be if robbed of all sense of long-term memory? Without memories, all that any person would know about life is if he or she was hungry or thirsty, cold or hot. Without memories of the past and shredded of any illusion of a future there cannot be a frame for our existence. Without a sense of memory, we lack cognition of the very essence of our being. In absence of our memories, there can be no introspection, no ethical awareness, and no devotion, loyalty, or love.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Is this neuro-bot really supposed to be her, this creature, this thing, compiled of the ghosts of human data, the replicas of their past?

When I was very little, my mother used to say there was something of my grandmother in me, in how I tell stories the way I need them to be and not the way they actually happened.

Do you know that I can't remember her face? Try as I may, it will not be conjured. I can tell you what she looked like; I can recite a description of her features, part by part, but I cannot evoke the whole face.''Don't you have a photograph?''Photographs!' He spat out the word. 'I'm talking about true recollection - seeing the face.

In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later.

I have woken up inside one of my own memories. I am really here, yet I know I am not.

You’re not the same. You’re not supposed to be the same. You’re supposed to be different. This isn’t something you will ever forget.

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