2,914 Quotes About Memory

Pasts are like bones. They grow and rip shards of internal bruising from within.

...but the loss of a memory, like the omission of a phrase during reading, rather than making for uncertainty, can lead to a premature certainty.

True love's memory, You are heavy!In your smoke I sing and burn,And the rest -- is only fireTo keep the chilled soul warm.To keep warm the sated body,They need my tears for thisDid I for this sing your song, God?Did I take part of love for this?Let me drink of such a poison,That I would be deaf and dumb,And my unglorious gloryWash away to the final crumb.

Like a white stone at the bottom of the well,One memory lies in me.I cannot and I do not want to struggle,It is both joy and suffering.I think that anyone who looks into myEyes will all at once see him.More sad and pensive he'll becomeThat heard the story of this suffering.I know that the gods had turnedPeople to objects, without killing mind,That divine sadness lived eternally.You're turned into my memory, I find.

the landscape tells - or rather is - a story. It enfolds the lives and times of predecessors who, over the generations, have moved around in it and played their part in its formation. To perceive the landscape is therefore to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perpetually with the environment that is itself pregnant with the past

Memory had a habit of erasing, leaving only the most necessary.

Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don't know her name? Although she has claim, she is not claimed. In the place where long grass opens, the girl who waited to be loved and cry shame erupts in her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing laughter to swallow her all away. It was not a story to pass on.

We belong to our past, each of us serving it in our own way, and to break the tether between that time and the present is to risk shattering ourselves in the process.

I was reminded of the old pain, a pain once so intense it was physical.