2,914 Quotes About Memory

I grounded myself by breathing into my scarf. Memories darted around the brown trees, thousands of them edging up on me. The past for me was 100 percent sad, the way that sometimes weather sites say it's 100 percent humidity outside, but it's still not raining.

The postcard came this morning. A postcard ... there's something touching about that, something from days gone by. The same days gone by to which you belong, where your roots lie, you might say.

This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products

Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.

You remember it your way and I'll remember it mine.

I caught myself being drawn ceaselessly back into a past that I wished mightily to emerge from -- I had come to know only recently that one *could* emerge without forgetting, and that to remember need not be to suffocate.

In order to be what it ‘is’, a text is an essentially vitiated, impure, open, haunted thing, consisting of traces and traces of traces: no text is purely present, nor was there some purely present text in the past.

Life isn’t in our brain // It flows through our veins. Just a little cut to drain out the galaxies that keep me up tonight. Just a little cut and all this goes away. Just a little cut and no more thoughts. No memories. No pain. I mean screw nostalgia. I don’t want it. Take it back!

Images are inherently fascistic because they overstamp the truth, however dim and blurred, of the real past experience; as if, faced with ruins, we must turn architects, not archeologists.