2,914 Quotes About Memory

I kissed my fingers,held my palm flat beside my mouth and blew it into the air that surrounded her memory. I closed my eyes, thinking this was one of those moments you see in movies or read about in books where everything comes together.

The spring came suddenly; the rains stopped, the days grew noticeably longer, and the afternoon light felt powdery, as if it might blow away.

Thought assists memory in enabling it to order the material it has assembled. So that in a systematically ordered memory every idea is individually followed by all conclusions it entails.

But it is always easy to put together stories about a past which nobody any longer remembers, like those about journeys to countries where nobody has ever been.

It's often the material things that provide the essence of memory.

We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us ... we are doing the work of memory.

People's lives take them strange places. They do strange things, and... well, sometimes they can't talk about them.

We may just be specters in this world, but our stories, if they are remembered and retold, become real and solid and alive... Once you hear a story, it becomes part of you. It can't die.

True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.