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049760d And with a relentlessness that comes from the world's depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone of my memory. It's the old streets with other people, the same streets that today are different; it's dead people speaking to me through the transparency of their absence; it's remorse for what I did or didn't do; it's the rippling of streams in the night, noises from below in the quiet building. I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn't belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me. I'm going crazy from having to hear. And in the end it is I - in my odiously impressionable brain, in my thin skin, in my hypersensitive nerves - who am the keys played in scales, O horrible and personal piano of our memory. despair hypersensitivity memory no-skin soul Fernando Pessoa
6cafa38 No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea. french infinite memory memory-trigger metafiction nostalgia novel self Marcel Proust
81df735 I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing; It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew. memory Lorrie Moore
1560b40 At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life. history memory Milan Kundera
229b937 "The cloudless day is richer at its close; A golden glory settles on the lea; Soft, stealing shadows hint of cool repose To mellowing landscape, and to calming sea. And in that nobler, gentler, lovelier light, The soul to sweeter, loftier bliss inclines; Freed form the noonday glare, the favour'd sight Increasing grace in earth and sky divines. But ere the purest radiance crowns the green, Or fairest lustre fills th' expectant grove, forest love love-lost lustre melancholy memory nature pantheism reminiscence romance sadness sky twilight H. P. Lovecraft
515f804 Leave old pains alone. When they cease coming to call, do not invite them back. honesty invite memories memory pain pains ponder remember reminiscence summon truth Robin Hobb
04d60e4 Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth. memory Milan Kundera
a1ba6f9 I took up space. I was a collection of cells and memories, awkward limbs and clumsy fashion crimes; I was the repository of my parents' expectations and evidence of their disappointments disappointment expectations life living memories memory parents Robin Wasserman
2bf92e1 Remembering the past always comes with an image or a view attached. memory remembering Orhan Pamuk
c6fbe44 In her eyes was the reflection of everything that mattered: old diners with neon signs, vinyl records, celluloid film, drive-in movies, Pears soap, department stores, her brother's old blue Camaro car and the smell of coal dust in the rainy sky of a summer lightning storm. ...And all the nice bright colors of the past that she thought were gone for good came flowing back into her life like a wave of nostalgia flooding over her, reds, yellows, blues and greens drenching her gray memories in psychedelic ribbons and glittering fireworks. ...She hoped that the world would always hold those miniscule yet beautiful, deep and mysterious traces of memory. beautiful bright colors earth found-footage kodak memory mystery nostalgia rurl world Rebecca McNutt
306eb95 History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments. memory Anne Michaels
f80a855 Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician's hand were holding you aloft? As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to stratum and discovers, under the quarries of Montmartre or in the schists of the Urals, those animals whose fossilized remains belong to antediluvian civilizations, the mind is startled to catch a vista of the milliards of years and the millions of peoples which the feeble memory of man and an indestructible divine tradition have forgotten and whose ashes heaped on the surface of our globe, form the two feet of earth which furnish us with bread and flowers. Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century? Certainly Lord Byron has expressed in words some aspects of spiritual turmoil; but our immortal natural historian has reconstructed worlds from bleached bones. civilization cuvier discoverer discovery feeble fossils genius geology george-byron george-gordon-byron george-gordon-noel george-gordon-noel-byron georges-cuvier historian immensity lord-byron memory mind montmartre natural poet poetry science space time treatise turmoil urals Honoré de Balzac
2a03eea "It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning -- it'll be gone." [ creative-process ideas memory notes writing Mary Oliver
71d9959 Memory is all I have now love memory memory-quote mourning tragic James Patterson
3fd7fc1 certain details, somewhat curtailed, live in my memory. But I don't see anything anymore: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction. memory sartre Jean-Paul Sartre
6fa9af7 Dissociation is characterized by a disruption of usually integrated functions of memory, consciousness, identity, or perception of the environment. identity memory mental-disorder mental-illness psychiatry psychology American Psychiatric Association
622ec6b In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a blue plastic canister without breaking stride. memory vomit William Gibson
e91ade3 Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. memory writing Annie Dillard
08f0b01 One's first memories are often vicarious: one is told that one did something or was involved in something; one dramatizes it and folds the image falsely into the annals of the truly remembered. memories-quotes memory Anthony Burgess
be67ef2 This is my home, Cape Breton is my home, and I don't know if I really want to leave it as much as I might think and I'm sort of scared to leave it all behind, everything I've lived with, I have so many memories of all the things I've done here and I'm afraid if I leave, I might lose all my memories... cape-breton home leaving loss memory moving nostalgia nova-scotia remember scared scary travel Rebecca McNutt
8f661fb It shouldn't work. It shouldn't be magic. You shouldn't weep happy and then sad and then happy again. But you do. And I do. And we all do. memory nostalgia Ray Bradbury
1753fe9 Time takes no holiday. It does not roll idly by, but through our senses works its own wonders in the mind. Time came and went from one day to the next; in its coming and its passing it brought me other hopes and other memories. [quoted in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 54] memory time Augustine of Hippo
0e1b739 "Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep black space high up among many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman's tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of the dots. At length, I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn't find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn't make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at the very moment with great emotion, in intricate detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which whole worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped, in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, "that was a good time then, a good time to be living." And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water...I saw may apples in forest, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided and apples grew striped and spotted in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves, and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wilds ducks flew, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remembered the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean's shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, "Yes, that's how it was then, that part there we called 'France'". I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes." dreams history memory nature reality Annie Dillard
09cfaa4 He's completely blown through his younger years like his childhood was one big cigarette to smoke carelessly. child childhood cigarette growing-up kid memory nostalgia smoke wasted-time young Rebecca McNutt
5ba39ab "... [O]ne of the most influential approaches to thinking about memory in recent years, known as connectionism, has abandoned the idea that a memory is an activated picture of a past event. Connectionist or neural network models are based on the principle that the brain stores engrams by increasing the strength of connections between different neurons that participate in encoding an experience. When we encode an experience, connections between active neurons become stronger, and this specific pattern of brain activity constitutes the engram. Later, as we try to remember the experience, a retrieval cue will induce another pattern of activity in the brain. If this pattern is similar enough to a previously encoded pattern, remembering will occur. The "memory" in a neural network model is not simply an activated engram, however. It is a unique pattern that emerges from the pooled contributions of the cue and the engram. A neural network combines information in the present environment with patterns that have been stored in the past, and the resulting mixture of the two is what the network remembers... When we remember, we complete a pattern with the best match available in memory; we do not shine a spotlight on a stored picture." engrams memory neuroscience psychology recollection Daniel L. Schacter
bacbfae Because who can describe the look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death? memory nostalgia John Irving
b31c32f She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death. czech existentialism meaning-of-life memory novel philosophy Milan Kundera
2c1d60b "Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep black space high up among many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman's tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of the dots. At length, I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn't find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn't make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at the very moment with great emotion, in intricate detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which whole worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped, in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, "that was a good time then, a good time to be living." And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water...I saw may apples in forest, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided and apples grew striped and spotted in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves, and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wilds ducks flew, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remembered the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean's shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, "Yes, that's how it was then, that part there we called 'France'". I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes." -- dreams history memory nature reality Annie Dillard
cb7e69d But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air. donna-tartt haunted memory prologue the-secret-history trapped Donna Tartt
80e1fdf The vivid memory of the woods had blossomed into a visceral longing for the Ridge, so immediate that I felt the ghost of my vanished house rise around me, a cold mountain wind thrumming past its walls, and thought that, if I reached down, I could feel Adso's soft gray fur under my fingers. I swallowed, hard. claire-fraser loss memory nostalgia Diana Gabaldon
da3abf1 If you are never frightened, sir, you would never find out what you was made of and what you was capable of doing. You would never become a better man than what you started out being. P'raps this is what you will discover - what you are made of and what you are capable of. And when you finally do remember who you are, p'raps you will find that you have become a better man than he ever was. P'raps he was a man why never ever grew any more once he reached manhood. P'raps he needed to do something drastic like losing his memory so that he could get his life unstuck. memory Mary Balogh
8603ab8 They, like me, like all of us, had, once upon a time, in a past so far away it seemed like heaven, caught by chance a glimpse of an inner essence, only to forget what it was. It was this lost memory that pained us, reduced us to ruins, though still we struggled to be ourselves. memory Orhan Pamuk
a12f831 He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves. memory threads Hilary Mantel
adbb30f Better to keep it in the old heads, where no one can see it or suspect it. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law. Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli, or Christ, it's here. And the hour's late. And the war's begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors... All we want to do is keep the knowledge we think we will need intact and safe. We're not out to incite or anger anyone yet. For if we are destroyed, the knowledge is dead, perhaps for good... Right now we have a horrible job; we're waiting for the war to begin and, as quickly, end. It's not pleasant, but then we're not in control, we're the odd minority crying in the wilderness. When the war's over, perhaps we can be of some use in the world. knowledge literature memory prophets Ray Bradbury
6b1a8b0 A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world. memoir memory Arthur Golden
a023226 I think there's a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer. julian-barnes memory the-only-story Julian Barnes
b1c1ec4 Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve? history mellow memory merit nostalgia personality philosophy time Julian Barnes
06942de A library is not information; it is a means of preserving information. In every case, before memory or information can be stored, someone must decide what must be stored. Someone must choose. Someone must curate. history memory John Scalzi
31467b6 "Once, in his first term, Cartwright had been bold enough to ask him why he was clever, what exercises he did to keep his brain fit. Healey had laughed. "It's memory, Cartwright, old dear. Memory, the mother of the Muses... at least that's what thingummy said." "Who?" "You know, what's his name, Greek poet chap. Wrote the Theogony... what he called? Begins with an 'H'." "Homer?" "No, dear. Not Homer, the other one. No, it's gone. Anyway. Memory, that's the key." intelligence memory Stephen Fry
7488603 . . . 'exist because there are no longer any , settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience.' And what are ? [They] are . . . vestiges . . . the rituals of a ritual-less society. memory milieux-de-memoire rituals vestiges Tony Judt
91f9894 Nora had been training herself not to think too much about her kids. Not because she wanted to forget them - not at all - but because she wanted to remember them more accurately. For the same reason, she tried not to look too often at old photographs or videos...After a while, these scraps hardened into a kind of official narrative that crowded out thousands of equally valid memories, shunting the losers to some cluttered basement storage area in her brain. memory Tom Perrotta
b461c72 Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words. memory reading Audrey Niffenegger
4d9229f Sitting in his old schoolroom on the sofa with little cushions on the arms and looking into Natasha's wildly eager eyes, Rostov was carried back into that world of home and childhood which had no meaning for anyone else, but gave him some of the greatest pleasure in his life. memory Leo Tolstoy
f8b8502 You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but remains forever, icy and silent. loss memory Harold Pinter
14877da 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. death memory post-mortem John Berger
c44cc75 ... I believe in some sense much akin to the belief of faith, that I noticed, felt, or underwent what I describe--but it may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual; so it may be that some of these events I describe never occurred at all, but only should have, and that others had not the shades and flavors--for example, of jealousy or antiquity or shame--that I have later unconsciously chosen to give them... memories memory unreliable-narrator Gene Wolfe
906df66 He was really quite addicted to her face, and yet for the longest time he could not remember it at all, it being so much brighter than sunlight on a pool of water that he could only recall that blinding brightness; then after awhile, since she refused to give him her photograph, he began to practice looking away for a moment when he was still with her, striving to uphold in his inner vision what he had just seen (her pale, serious, smooth and slender face, oh, her dark hair, her dark hair), so that after immense effort he began to retain something of her likeness although the likeness was necessarily softened by his fallibility into a grainy, washed-out photograph of some bygone court beauty, the hair a solid mass of black except for parallel streaks of sunlight as distinct as the tines of a comb, the hand-tinted costume sweetly faded, the eyes looking sadly, gently through him, the entire image cob-webbed by a sheet of semitranslucent Thai paper whose white fibers twisted in the lacquered space between her and him like gorgeous worms; in other words, she remained eternally elsewhere. memory photography William T. Vollmann
8949a84 "You're bigger than I remember," she said stupidly. "You too," he said. "I also remember that you were beautiful." "Memory does play tricks on us." "No. Your face is the same, but I don't remember what beautiful means anymore. Come on. Let's go out into the lake." children ender forget meaning memory valentine your-face Orson Scott Card
6349dfe 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. donna-tartt memory the-secret-history Donna Tartt
986b2db "Wait." Walter went to the basket, taking what was a gray sleeve, drawing it out fro the middle of the heap. "Oh," He said. He held the shapeless wool sweater to his chest. Joyce had knit for months the year Daniel died, and here was the result, her handiwork, the garment that would fit a giant. It was nothing more than twelve skeins of yarn and thousands of loops, but it had the power to bring back in a flash the green-tiled walls of the hospital, the sound of an ambulance trying to cut through city traffic in the distance, the breathing of the dying boy, his father staring at the ceiling, the full greasy bucket of fried chicken on he bed table. "I'll take this one," Walter said, balling up the sweater as best he could, stuffing it into a shopping bag that was half full of the books he was taking home, that he was borrowing. "Oh, honey," Joyce said. "You don't want that old scrap." "You made it. I remember your making it." Keep it light, he said to himself, that's a boy. "There's a use for it. Don't you think so, Aunt Jeannie? No offense, Mom, but I could invade the Huns with it or strap the sleeves to my car tires in a blizzard, for traction, or protect our nation with it out in space, a shield against nuclear attack." Jeannie tittered in her usual way in spite of herself. "You always did have that sense of humor," she said as she went upstairs. When she was out of range, Joyce went to Walter's bag and retrieved the sweater. She laid it on the card table, the long arms hanging down, and she fingered the stitches. "Will you look at the mass of it," she exclaimed. "I don't even recall making it." ""'Memory -- that strange deceiver,'" Walter quoted." knitting memory sweater Jane Hamilton
3e8a2ff ... and then beginning to go back to what you can't even remember. memory Graham Greene
b33a883 The memory of the pain did not destroy the reality of the pleasure; grief did not obliterate joy. inspirational joy memories memory pain past-and-present pleasure reality Orson Scott Card
f85b7af The kiss stayed there with no place to go, no sensory reserve that could absorb it and file it away as a common act of intimacy, a thousand times received. He knew what Anna was asking: whether you could love someone without habits. love memory Nicole Krauss
8ee4a29 And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving good-bye, I think about all the different ways we leave people in this world. Cheerily waving good-bye to some at airports, knowing we'll never see each other again. Leaving others on the side of the road, hoping that we will. Finding my mother in my father's story and saying good-bye before I have a chance to know her better. good-byes loss memory Amy Tan
5d1030a A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her dreaming private life--the nation, the city, the neighborhood, the house where the family lives--as an actual project under way, a project living people willed, and made well or failed, and are still making, herself among them. I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers. childhood history memory Annie Dillard
89a08db Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way. memory memory-loss Günter Grass
61e0a30 "Those were her best days, although there was always something feckless about her, something so slack and almost fearful in her too frequent smile, so that when you saw Mignon being happy, you always thought: "It can't last." She had the febrile gaiety of a being without a past, without a present, yet she existed thus, without memory or history, only because her past was too bleak to think of and her future too terrible to contemplate; she was the broken blossom of the present tense." memory the-present Angela Carter
5be803d But then what does it matter whence comes the gentle nudge that jars the soul into motion and sets it rolling, doomed never again to stop? memory soul Vladimir Nabokov
1620113 As it is? meaning memory Harold Pinter
6f062af A person in her twenties has been a child for most of her life, but as time goes by that portion that is childhood becomes smaller and smaller, more and more distant, more and more faded, though they say at the end of life the beginning returns with renewed vividness, as though you had sailed all the way around the world and were going back into the darkness from which you came. memory nostalgia old-age travel youth Rebecca Solnit
6e3a78b In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places. memory public-history Wallace Stegner
d713e2c When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it's happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting. [...] We die without knowing what we have lived. memory present time Milan Kundera
dd01342 He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn't help: he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible. memory nostalgia Milan Kundera
2cc44df I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments. memory old-age Julian Barnes
8cd1173 I cut the wood however I like, but it's the grain that decides the strength and shape of it. You can add and subtract memories from people, but it isn't just your memory that makes you who you are. There's something in the grain of the mind. individuality memory mind Orson Scott Card
93bcaf1 Afterwards Isabelle often wondered if the moments themselves were greater or the memory of them. At least the memory did not pass, while the moments passed all too fast. Life whizzed by; she no longer had time to recollect it. Her notebooks to this day retain the story of her desperate attempt to hold together her self, her mind, her reason, her order, her morals. memory Toni Bentley
d8a1259 "When a Truthsayer's gifted by the drug, she can look many places in her memory - in her body's memory. We look down so many avenues of the past... but only feminine avenues... Yet there's a place no Truthsayer can see. We are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where we cannot - into both feminine and masculine pasts... Many men have tried the drug... so many, but none has succeeded." "They tried and failed, all of them?" "They tried and died." failure fear feminine masculine memory truth Frank Herbert
dd39c15 In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. To hold a gesture, a smell, a smile was to cast it as one fixed thing, a plaster death mask, which as soon as it was touched crumbled in his figures back into dust. loss memory time Richard Flanagan
aea7d46 If memory is unreliable, if the past and the present can simply change without warning, then fact and truth will cease to exist. How do we live in a world like that? memory reality truth Blake Crouch
ca44e27 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. fall memory night smell walks youth Blake Crouch
10fd338 I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean....I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you couldn't find, among the files of clothing labels and heaps of rocks, among the swarms of protozoans and shelves of novels, whole tapes and snarls and reels of Bible. ideas memoir memory religion Annie Dillard
6860106 "This time of year, the purple blooms were busy with life- not just the bees, but butterflies and ladybugs, skippers and emerald-toned beetles, flitting hummingbirds and sapphire dragonflies. The sun-warmed sweet haze of the blossoms filled the air. "When I was a kid," said Isabel, "I used to capture butterflies, but I was afraid of the bees. I'm getting over that, though." The bees softly rose and hovered over the flowers, their steady hum oddly soothing. The quiet buzzing was the soundtrack of her girlhood summers. Even now, she could close her eyes and remember her walks with Bubbie, and how they would net a monarch or swallowtail butterfly, studying the creature in a big clear jar before setting it free again. They always set them free. As she watched the activity in the hedge, a memory floated up from the past- Bubbie, gently explaining to Isabel why they needed to open the jar. "No creature should ever be trapped against its will," she used to say. "It will ruin itself, just trying to escape." As a survivor of a concentration camp, Bubbie only ever spoke of the experience in the most oblique of terms." bubbie butterflies eva-johansen flowers insects isabel-johansen magnus-johansen memory nature-s-beauty summertime Susan Wiggs
fb3feb1 I never knew him. We both knew this place, apparently, this literal small backwater, looked at it long enough to memorize it, our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved, or its memory is (it must have changed a lot). Our visions coincided--'visions' is too serious a word--our looks, two looks: art 'copying from life' and life itself, life and the memory of it so compressed they've turned into each other. Which is which? Life and the memory of it cramped, dim, on a piece of Bristol board, dim, but how live, how touching in detail --the little that we get for free, the little of our earthly trust. Not much. About the size of our abidance along with theirs: the munching cows, the iris, crisp and shivering, the water still standing from spring freshets, the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese. life life-and-living memory Elizabeth Bishop
e7c8910 "evening harmony behold the times when trembling on their stems the flowers evaporate like thuribles the sounds and scents turn in the evening cool; sad waltz, languid intoxication! the flowers evaporate like thuribles the viol quivers like a heart that's torn sad waltz, languid intoxication! the sky is sad like some memorial. the viol quivers like a heart that's torn a heart that hates the void perpetual! the sky is sad like some memorial the sun has drowned in it's vermillion a heart that hates the void perpetual recalls each glowing moment of times gone! evening-harmony memory smells Charles Baudelaire
acdf685 The uncertainty of the future made them turn their hearts toward the past. They saw themselves in the lost paradise of the deluge, splashing in the puddles in the courtyard, killing lizards to hang on Ursula, pretending that they were going to bury her alive, and those memories revealed to them the truth that they had been happy together ever since they had had memory. love memory nostalgia soulmates Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
5ab6901 As dye soaks fibres, drawn into them to change their colour forever, so does a memory, stinging or sweet, change the fibre of a man's character. memory personality Robin Hobb
b42e34b Alecto isn't a person! He's just something that society made and then threw away, a memory that refuses to die. canada cape-breton coal created death dying kodak-moment memory mining nostalgia nova-scotia person pollution society steel super-8 threw Rebecca McNutt
610ce95 "Your childhood," said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties. Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind." history memories memory past thoughts words Gregory Maguire
40160ef He thinks perhaps there's a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases. memory sci-fi science-fiction time Blake Crouch
68e78ff But the lost one is with you. Her tenderness strengthens you, Her gaiety uplifts you, Her honor purifies you. More than memory, The lost one is found. life memory Gail Carson Levine
e9b03c3 She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter. death memory Ray Bradbury
2cd9014 I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me. donna-tartt guilt haunted indelible memory prologue the-secret-history Donna Tartt
98dcbe9 By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame. memory shame ruth ozeki
5dc8a7b "Every day it's something worse being predicted. Mearth says that sooner or later copyright on books will be all in the past because they'll all be available electronically. She says that electric cars will replace gasoline-powered cars. She says that something called drones will be used to watch the entire country, she talks a lot about something called nanotechnology, and 3-dimensional printing and cellular phones being implanted into peoples' minds and all available careers being replaced by robots and human cloning and overpopulation and film becoming obsolete, cellular phones making regular telephones obsolete and LED lighting replacing everything and eventually she says that the planet will collapse and become an apathetic wreck," Alecto replied rapidly, his run-on sentence sounding sinister and dangerous. "Mearth says that eventually people will be able to see inside the minds of everyone." digital film led-lights memory mental-illness microchips minds nanotechnology nostalgia obsolete retro sinister technology telephone Rebecca McNutt
86d5731 The fact is that I hate this city. I've hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it. memory Margaret Atwood
dc27394 And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving good-bye, I think about all the different ways we leave people in this world. Cheerily waving good-bye to some at airports, knowing we'll never see each other again. Leaving others on the side of the road, hoping that we will. Finding my mother in my father's story and saying good-bye before before I have a chance to know her better. good-bye loss memory Amy Tan
5915692 The way you remember or dream about your loved ones - the ones who are gone - you can't stop their endings from jumping ahead of the rest of their stories. You don't get to choose the chronology of what you dream, or the order of events in which you remember someone. In your mind - in your dreams, in your memories - sometimes the story begins with the epilogue. death end family friends inspiration life love memories memory nostalgia relationships thoughts John Irving
d94bb30 Home is an emotional state, a place in the imagination where feelings of security, belonging, placement, family, protection, memory and personal history abide. -Thomas Moore emotion family feel history home hygge memory protect secure Louisa Thomsen Brits
55c9b93 The mind is like an object that picks up dust. The object doesn't know, any more than the mind does, why what clings to it clings. memories memory mind James Baldwin
cf05dd3 You must remind me, little one. When I... when I lose myself - when I lose her - you must remind me that I am still searching, still waiting... that I have never forgotten her, never turned from all she taught me. I sit in this place... I sit... because a king has to sit, you see... but in my mind, in my poor mind, I am always away with her.... love memory Peter S. Beagle
71cd4b4 Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer. They control the most simple Proustian episode, and an understanding of their mechanism must precede any particular analysis of their application. memory time Samuel Beckett
4550544 ...to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory... houses memory streets Graham Greene
284d4e2 He could swear he did not look back, could not--by any optical chance, or in any prism--have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture--which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never--consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past. memory remembering Vladimir Nabokov
1f6bdbc He sometimes asked himself a question about life. Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable. julian-barnes life memories memory the-only-story truth unanswerable unhappy-memories Julian Barnes
289ad7a Still, he was pleased to know that he could recall so much of the play and passed the rest of the journey pleasantly in reciting lines to himself, being careful not to snort. memory play Diana Gabaldon
abd7cba All loss is one, and one loss becomes all, a single death is the key to the gate that bars memory. loss memory Diana Gabaldon
826ef50 Dark, cool, musty, smoky, where light fell funny and everyone looked like someone you knew or wanted to know. Or, more likely, wanted to forget. forget memory regrets David Baldacci
35ca3af "For some reason, I kept seeing it--it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina--a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, "pinging" pebbles at an empty can." memory sad vladimir-nabokov Vladimir Nabokov
c253492 The ants Geiser recently observed under a dripping fir tree are not concerned with what anyone might know about them; nor were the dinosaurs, which died out before a human being set eyes on them. All the papers, whether on the wall or on the carpet, can go. Who cares about the Holocene? Nature needs no names. Geiser knows that. The rocks do not need his memory. memory nature Max Frisch
59df9c1 "perhaps you know that Ingeborg Bachmann poem from the last years of her life that begins "I lose my screams" dear Antigone, I take it as the task of the translator to forbid that you should ever lose your screams" memory trauma Anne Carson
fc6c0d6 She is a rarer creature than you dare to dream. She is a myth, a memory, a will-o'-the-wish. memory myth she Peter S. Beagle
309fd0f But what was good tween us must have been nothing but bodies, she say. Cause I don't know the Albert that don't dance, can't hardly laugh, never talk bout nothing, beat you and hid your sister Nettie's letters. Who he? deceit love memory relationship alice walker
1994906 "["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'." memory nostalgia Sebastian Faulks
69584a3 He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where he'd landed and made his life, was not his, memory past Jhumpa Lahiri
48d6d01 bry hmyn Hl drm rh w rwshm r `wD my knm w dstkm f`l khdHfZ dftr khTrt. hmyshh Hss my krdm mjry wq``jyb w Gryb dr zndgy m tfq my ftd, w khyly mhm st kh hmh chyz r thbt krdh bshm. y`ny yn fqT yk Hss bwd? memory Alice Munro
cb623f8 He didn't remember the very first time he actually died very well. It wasn't as bad as remediation, but he remembered being afraid and worried... and when he found himself alive again a few hours later with Mearth's wild green eyes peering down at him, he remembered still being afraid and worried. It was strange, he thought, to be afraid of being alive... but being alive was worse than being dead in his mind. alive death fear green life memory pain suffering worry Rebecca McNutt
cf77757 It was one of the few stories we told the same way. gillian-flynn gone-girl memory nick-and-amy stories Gillian Flynn
3c4dcf5 I don't know what it is about the food your mother makes for you, especially when it's something that anyone can make - pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad - but it carries a certain taste of memory. love memory mother Mitch Albom
db8c931 When I first began to write, I had been a child for most of my life, and my childhood memories were vivid and potent, and the forces that shaped me, Most of them have grown fainter with time, and whenever I write one down, I give it away: it ceases to have the shadowy life of memory and becomes fixed in letters: it ceases to be mine; it loses that mobile unreliability of the live. memory nostalgia writing Rebecca Solnit
afa2f60 As usual, he saves his wife's for last. He leans on the cane and he looks at the headstone and he thinks about many things. Taffy. He thinks about taffy. He thinks it would take his teeth out now, but he would eat it anyhow, if it meant eating it with her. death graveyard headstone humour love memory sacrifice taffy teeth widower Mitch Albom
e5891b3 I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deep-rooted; places that might be points of reference, of departure, of origin: My birthplace, the cradle of my family, the house where I may have been born, the tree I may have seen grow (that my father may have planted the day I was born), the attic of my childhood filled with intact memories... My spaces are fragile: time is going to wear them away, to destroy them. Nothing will any longer resemble what was, my memories will betray me, oblivion will infiltrate my memory, I shall look at a few old yellowing photographs with broken edges without recognising them... Space melts like sand running through one's fingers. Time bears it away and leaves me only shapeless shreds: To write: To try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs. memory mortality space time writing Georges Perec
ffe302a "Mearth appeared angry and disappointed briefly, but then she just gazed at the ground. "...It must be horrible, feeling all alone, is it?" she asked. "Oh, not really," said Alecto, his eyes lifeless, his voice listless. "I'm going to be forgotten by someone who I can't forget, though. That will be terrible... but maybe it's better if she does forget me altogether." forget friendship listless lonliness love memory sad sadness Rebecca McNutt
733cf38 "...Look, I'm real sorry about Cheryl, I know you loved her a lot," Mandy apologized gloomily. "It's wrong that people have to keep killing off Pollution." "It's alright, I think she wants to be remediated," Alecto told her calmly, though his grief-stricken and depressed expression said more to Mandy than his words did. "You don't have to forget Cheryl, no matter what Mearth said to you," Mandy pointed out. "People shouldn't be forced to forget what they love, or to just get over the death of what they love. Cheryl was your friend and nobody can make you forget her if you don't want to." confusion death depression fear friendship grief grief-stricken help hope lonliness loss love memory pollution remediation removal uncertainty Rebecca McNutt
e4c945c "7 Up soda pop mixed with bright pink grenadine with a chemical-tasting maraschino cherry stuck to the plastic straw. It was one of those drinks marketed for children, but Mandy could see that she wasn't the only adult ordering one. For some reason or other these old-fashioned restaurants always seemed to attract old ladies ordering strawberry Jell-O with whipped cream, truck drivers ordering "worms and dirt" (chocolate pudding with Oreo cookies squished over the top in a glass bowl, fruit-flavoured gummy worms over the cookie crumbs) and businessmen trying not to get syrup from their hot fudge sundaes on their neckties and tailored suits. Mandy figured that maybe they were all trying to grasp a time way back in the past when they were all little children, excitedly ordering desert for a special occasion under the warm incandescent light from above, cheerful and bouncing music filling their minds. Hurriedly she ate the food, paid the tab and hurried back to her car in the bitter wind, not wanting to stick around for very long." adult bounce businessman canada car cherry childhood desert diner growing-up kid memory music shirley-temple snow swiss-chalet wind Rebecca McNutt
c70aca6 He listened to the hooting of many metal horns, squealing of brakes, the calls of vendors selling red-purple bananas and jungle oranges in their stalls. Colonel Freeleigh's feet began to move, hanging from the edge of his wheel chair, making the motions of a man walking. His eyes squeezed tight. He gave a series of immense sniffs, as if to gain the odors of meats hung on iron hooks in sunshine, cloaked with flies like a mantle of raisins; the smell of stone alleys wet with morning rain. He could feel the sun bum his spiny-bearded cheek, and he was twenty-five years old again, walking, walking, looking, smiling, happy to be alive, very much alert, drinking in colors and smells. memory nostalgia streets vendors Ray Bradbury
e850f11 I go, but I always remember you. journey love memory Isabel Allende
82c3b69 - Kato dete izpitvakh s'shchoto po klonite na golemite d'rveta. Da stoish prilepen do edin stvol, tolkova dreven, che i nai-drevnata choveshka pamet blednee pred nego, ti vnushava s'shchoto chuvstvo za miasto v sveta. бард bulgarian elder human longbow martin memory old philosopher philosophy riftwar saga sea tree български война древен дълголъкия дървета място памет разлом реймънд свят фийст философ човек чувство Raymond E. Feist
89c310d There such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious. ghosts memory Donna Tartt
987aaa9 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. donna-tartt memory the-secret-history Donna Tartt
bc3d81c "This is a story, told the way you say stories should be told: Somebody grew up, fell in love, and spent a winter with her lover in the country. This, of course, is the barest outline, and futile to discuss. It's as pointless as throwing birdseed on the ground while snow still falls fast. Who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost? People forget years and remember moments. Seconds and symbols are left to sum things up: the black shroud over the pool. Love, in its shortest form, becomes a word. What I remember about all that time is one winter. The snow. Even now, saying "snow," my lips move so that they kiss air. No mention has been made of the snowplow that seemed always to be there, scraping snow off our narrow road -- an artery cleared, though neither of us could have said where the heart was." memory Ann Beattie
744c696 The double-crossed, might-have-been history of my country is not the study of what actually took place here: it's the study of historians' studies. . . . Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present. memory place David Mitchell
3a704f3 . . . what is thought now, and held to be universal truth, was not thought then, or true of that time. judgment memory George MacDonald Fraser
5d70777 Of course we live in dreams and by dreams, and even in a disciplined spiritual life, in some ways especially there, it is hard to distinguish dream from reality. In ordinary human affairs humble common sense comes to one's aid. For most people common sense moral sense. But you seem to have deliberately excluded this modest source of light. Ask yourself, what really happened between whom all those years ago? You've made it into a story, and stories are false. iris-murdoch memory meta reality story the-past the-sea-the-sea Iris Murdoch
f009e93 "Steerpike of the Many Problems," said the Doctor. "What did you say they were? My memory is so very untrustworthy. It's as fickle as a fox. Ask me to name the third lateral bloodvessel from the extremity of my index finger that runs east to west when I lie on my face at sundown, or the percentage of chalk to be found in the knuckles of an average spinster in her fifty-seventh year, ha, ha, ha! - or even ask me, my dear boy, to give details of the pulse rate of frogs two minutes before they die of scabies - these things are no tax upon my memory, ha, ha, ha! But ask me to remember exactly what you said you problems were, a minute ago, and you will find that my memory has forsaken me utterly. Now why is that, my dear Master Steerpike, why is that?" "Because I never mentioned them," said Steerpike. "That accounts for it," said Prunesquallor. "That, no doubt, accounts for it." memory Mervyn Peake
199d4fc She has passed information to you. Figures names and facts. You have learnt nothing very much. But you have a splendid memory. It will help you when you start to learn. learning memory Richard Llewellyn
99f0f2e I remember, in no particular order: --a shiny inner wrist; --steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it; --gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house; --a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams; --another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface; --bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door. This last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed. We live in time--it holds us and moulds us--but I've never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return. I'm not very interested in my schooldays, and don't feel any nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can't be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That's the best I can manage. memory time Julian Barnes
565b66b But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions--and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives--then I plead guilty . . . And if we're talking about strong feelings that will never come again, I suppose it's possible to be nostalgic about remembered pain as well as remembered pleasure. And that opens up the field, doesn't it? julian-barnes memory nostalgia pain pleasure the-sense-of-an-ending Julian Barnes
4c47a18 Time could heal, but it wouldn't make wrongs go away. Time came back like a reminder. Time folded with memory. In a moment, everything could fold itself up, and time stand still. karen-tei-yamashita memories memory time tropic-of-orange Karen Tei Yamashita
3b922cf You used to say you would never forget me. That made me feel like the cherry blossom, here today and gone tomorrow; it is not the kind of thing one says to a person with whom one proposes to spend the rest of one's life, after all. And, after all that, for three hundred and fifty-two in each leap year, I never think about you, sometimes. I cast an image into the past, like a fishing line, and up it comes with a gold mask on the hook, a mask with real tears at the ends of its eyes, but tears that are no longer anybody's tears. Time has drifted over your face. memory Angela Carter
6a2a081 But of course, in one sense, Dean never died - his existence is superior to such accidents. One must have heroes, which is to say, one must create them. And they become real through our envy, our devotion. It is we who give them their majesty, their power, which ourselves could never possess. And in turn, they give some back. But they are mortal, these heroes, just as we are. They do not last forever. They fade. They vanish. They are surpassed, forgotten - one hears of them no more. hero memory remeberance role-model time James Salter
068ac97 The print was an old one made from a negative taken in the 1960's of her parents in Sydney Mines, dancing with thrilled, excited expressions on their faces, in front of a classic car that had been a wedding gift at the time. Her mother's hair, red back then, was held back by a blue handkerchief, and she was dressed in a billowing skirt and white blouse. Her father's denim jeans and faded t-shirt were streaked with coal dust as he held her hands and spun her around in the front yard of their old clapboard house, yellow grass under their feet and a cobalt-blue sky with white clouds drifting above. Mandy could almost feel the late summer breeze as she gazed deeply into the print, watching the flamboyant colors come to life. She hung it up to dry on two wooden clothespins hanging from a string above her. arents canada coal coal-mine dancing darkroom kodachrome memory nostalgia photography poverty print retro Rebecca McNutt
0b1934b Marina wouldn't want to be remembered because she dead. She would want to be remembered because she's good. being-remembered memory talent Anne Fadiman
d13e896 "What had Old Joe Hunt answered when I knowingly claimed that history was the lies of the victors? "As long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated." Do we remember that enough when it comes to our private lives?" life memories memory time Julian Barnes
d3486c7 So (and this would have happened earlier, but I am only remembering it now): I am visiting her one afternoon. memory nonlinear storytelling the-only-story Julian Barnes
ce59c1f It is only a metaphor--or the worst of dreams; yet there are metaphors which sit more powerfully in the brain than remembered events. julian-barnes memory metaphor reality the-only-story Julian Barnes
86b4123 She has only a ghostplay on some frayed screen of memory, which she takes to be the present. memory memory-loss the-only-story Julian Barnes
27bdd9a This last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed. memory the-sense-of-an-ending Julian Barnes
d0a4d51 Everyone remembers things which never happened. And it is common knowledge that people often forget things which did. Either we are all fantasists and liars or the past has nothing definite in it. lies memory reality truth Jeanette Winterson
8371c9d Jehanne said that it would always be like this. That I would always be young and beautiful in her memory, and she in mine. That I would never grow resentful, never be tempted to betray her. That she would never grow restless and fickle, and see to replace me. So you see, not exactly the sentiments of a great and terrible love affair. love-affair memory Jacqueline Carey
101d60c When he looked back at the menu as an old man, it brought back everything; the food, the wine, the private dining room, the pride he took in being able to pay for such a dinner, the convergence of his life as a writer and his life as an oenophile, the conviviality that grew as the night continued and everyone had a little too much to drink but not enough to impair the quality of the conversation, some of which, I feel sure, was about the wines themselves. food memory wine Anne Fadiman
4e83d7e Geschichten sind unser Gedachtnis, Bibliotheken die Lagerstatten fur dieses Gedachtnis und Lesen das Handwerk, mit dem wir dieses Gedachtnis neu erschaffen konnen, indem wir es rezitieren und glossieren, es wieder in unsere eigene Erfahrung ruckubersetzen und so auf dem aufbauen, was fruhere Generationen fur bewahrenswert hielten. memory readers reception Alberto Manguel
13c70cf Die Freunde, an die ich denke, sind in der Zeit gefangen wie in einem Film. Sie (viele von ihnen sind tot, verschollen) sind in dem Alter, in dem ich sie zuletzt gesehen habe; ich bezweifle, dass sie mich jetzt wiedererkennen wurden. friends inspirational memory past remembering vergangenheit Alberto Manguel
7d21314 Pomieszczenie wygladalo tak, jak je zapamietalem. Albo wygladalo, jak gdyby bylo takie, jakim je zapamietalem, gdyz z reguly wspomnienia dopasowuja sie niezauwazalnie do rzeczy i miejsc z odwiedzanej przeszlosci. memory John Banville
63ecf54 Tu eres tu propio enemigo, Ryan. Empieza por perdonarte, si no te perdonas vas a vivir siempre prisionero del pasado, castigado por la memoria, que es subjetiva. enemy forgiveness memoria memory pasado past perdón Isabel Allende
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