2,914 Quotes About Memory

There are some moments that are hung in memory like a lamp; they shine and swing gently and one can look back on them when all else has faded into distance and darkness.

Memory, it seems, isn't always material out of which to make art. Sometimes remembering refuses us. Sometimes I'm a shoreline the water of memory drags its palm across.

Truth is the thing you must not say.' She told me this. Known and unknown mourning for a volatile and impossible tongue. Between absence and presence. 'And is that love?''What does it matter? Love, a word.

The lead from her pencil covers her fingers, her knuckles. She rubs out as many words as she writes. Her words always on the verge of being erased. Words written on top of words. Words crossed out. Many of her words are missing. They have been lifted off the pages and rubbed onto her skin. The words that do remain carry her skin with them.

It began with a poem, with words. Words were all I had, dull echoes in my brain. Fragile cobwebs. Her lipstick words pressed against my memories. “Stop thinking,” I repeated to myself like a mantra. But we do not think memories, memories think us.

It became more difficult to breathe. I looked around. My body was now included among the objects arranged on the floor. I lay there between the music box and the harmonica, my two legs protruding at odd angles, my hands crossed on my chest, my eyes lowered. In the same way he had wound the spring on the music box or blown into the harmonica, I imagined R would now caress my body in order to call forth memories.

There are moments when the past has a force so strong it seems one might be annihilated by it.

Language is a terrible, cold thing, I think. One may recount an event, calmly selecting the most suitable words, that to remember without benefit of ink is almost beyond bearing. We accept the counterfeit and are thankful, for it spares us the awful weight of our lives.

Some of us might seek to be one step ahead of memory, to whittle the loose ends of our personal histories down to a single knowable object (a block of clay or a diary or a memoir), to expose a kind of hidden or suppressed truth, to give it a form, to contain it, to master it.