2,914 Quotes About Memory

Memory is fiction . . . All memory is a way of reconstructing the past. . . The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction. [Armitstead, Claire. “Damon Galgut talks about his novel In a Strange Room.” The Guardian. 10 September 2010.]

Beyond the late Fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the details of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then.

You don’t learn confidence, you remember it.

Sometimes things just slip past you, into your hands and out through your fingers. In my half-in/half-out state I began to wonder if that could happen to people, too.

IT IS SO CURIOUS how hearing something once in your youth can dictate a thought pattern all the way through your life. I was nine, a man said something nonchalantly, and now when I see a slate at age thirty-six, as far as I'm concerned, its primary use is for beheading boys. Once that's done it can be used for roofing.

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.

A great mystery lies in the repetition and continuity of the renewal of that which is past. Culture perpetuates itself in memory and the big job is the reawakening of memory.

I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should not probably forget all about them.

Never be afraid when God brings back your past. Let your memory have its way with you. It is a minister of God bringing its rebuke and sorrow to you.