2,914 Quotes About Memory

Nobody belongs to us, except in memory.” ("Grandparenting" [1994])

All my life, I've felt as thoughI'm inside a beautiful memory, replayingwith the sound turned down low.

Memories get you where they want you, not the other way around.

It takes time, though, for Naoko's face to appear. And as the years have passed, the time has grown longer. The sad truth is that what I could recall in 5 seconds all too soon needed 10, then 30, then a full minute - like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness.

But he doesn't understand that memory is abstract and chaotic. Memory isn't straightforward. It surfaces in sounds and images and feelings. He doesn't realised that in getting another person's memory, he will lose parts of himself

There's no memory you can wrap in camphorBut the moths will get in.

Can something be called a memory if it is untrue?

I continue to gaze into the valley bottom of the memory. And my fear now is that as soon as a memory forms it immediately takes on the wrong light, mannered, sentimental as war and youth always are, becomes a piece of narrative written in the style of the time, which can't tell us how things really were but only how we thought we saw them, thought we said them. I don't know if I am destroying the past or saving it, the past hidden in that besieged village.

Time goes faster when it's spentOn slowing steps to look behindTo let the spool of years unwindAnd dream of all my yesterdays