2,914 Quotes About Memory

They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon—smells and sounds I’d grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer.

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.

If water could talk, there'd be some trace of all these years. It would tell of all it had taught him. How the lightest, most transparent things are heavy. How much effort it takes to contain what cannot be held; water runs through your fingers, so you find yourself empty-handed and still thirsty. But as water has no memory, no trace of his rage and loneliness will remain. He has lost those years forever.

I will be waiting for you at the end of every blind alley, under the lonely streetlamps of a city that will no longer be ours.When the wind grows colder and the huge piles of settled leaves sit there for a week or two, unshielded from the curious gaze of passersby, I will be waiting for you.I will be waiting for what could have been and for what will never be;For the letters that never arrived, the letters that were never sent, and the letters that will never be written.

Ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin.

Depuis, le Paris où j'ai tenté de retrouver sa trace est demeuré aussi désert et silencieux que ce jour-là. Je marche à travers les rues vides. Pour moi, elles le restent, même le soir, à l'heure des embouteillages, quand les gens se pressent vers les bouches de métro. Je ne peux pas m'empêcher de penser à elle et de sentir un écho de sa présence dans certains quartiers.

I try to remember everything, every thing, but sometimes I forget something. I don’t even know what it is sometimes, but I know it’s not coming to me, something about him isn’t coming to me and when that happens, when a piece is missing, it makes me crazy. I don’t know what to do with that.

Home is memory and companions and/or friends who share the memory.

There is magic just outside our memory.