2,914 Quotes About Memory

What I know are simple truths. I know that the fabric of memory is reinforced by stories, rent by silences. I know that power dreads memory. I know that memory outlasts power's viciousness. I know . . . that a voiceless man is as good as dead.

There is never a first time in memory, it is only in life that the future is uncertain, in memory the pain always returns in precisely the same manner, rushing to the present, you have to avoid certain places as you go over the past with the eye of the camera, whoever looks at himself on such s a screen loses all hope.

If a person knits as you speak of the past, you can become mesmerized. As the yarn unwinds from its skein your memories naturally unfold to their full length.

Defrosting a frozen memory can get the present all wet.

He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.

We suicide ourselves for our own survival. Is there any hope of dipping back into the past and circling round it like you can in art?

The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.

A moment only happens once but some of them take so much longer than a moment to understand, to see.

We should kill our pasts with each passing day. Blot them out, so that they will not hurt. Each present day could thus be endured more easily, it would not be measured against what no longer exists. As things our, spectres mix with our lives so that there is neither pure memory nor pure life. They clash and try to strangle each other, continually.