2,914 Quotes About Memory

To rememberIs not to rehearse, but to hear what neverHas fallen silent.

I let myself drift, as to the depth of an ocean, to the depths of a dismal neighborhood of had and opaque but rather light houses, to the inner gaze of memory, for the matter of memory is porous

All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulation: that is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.

I write to become a presence, not a memory.

Memory, that exhausted repertory actor, going through the exhausted, familiar lines of some tired melodrama. It moved through the now meaningless scenes with a terrible practised proficiency for her benefit alone; and she was in the wings, condemned to watch it over and over

I let myself drift, as to the depth of an ocean, to the depths of a dismal neighborhood of hard and opaque but rather light houses, to the inner gaze of memory, for the matter of memory is porous.

There's no such thing as forgetting. No matter how hard you try, you only think you've forgotten, and over time the things you think you have forgotten emerge again under another guise and tear into your soul. Understand this: whoever says they have forgotten have merely condemned themselves to an endless repetition of the same event until the end of their lives.

Names disappear, but not the faces. The faces stay with you.

Memory is a spiderweb. It hangs in a corner and collects dust. Until you need it to catch a fly.