273 Quotes About Remembering

People always talk about how hard it can be to remember things - where they left their keys, or the name of an acquaintance - but no one ever talks about how much effort we put into forgetting. I am exhausted from the effort to forget... There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.

One couldn’t be selective when remembering the past. Ignore the turmoil, chaos and pain – and the truly great memories would not shine with such luster.

Sitting on the floor, I'd replay the past in my head. Funny, that's all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I'd been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.

But it was smell that carried memory.

When I was a kid my mom would send me off to school each day with the words, ‘Remember: be happy! The most important thing today is that you are happy!

Memories are a form of simile: when we say something is 'like' we are remembering.

The memory is what lasts; history is written as substantiation.

You don’t realise until you have no memories at all that you are a product of them. When you are an empty sheet of paper, you can’t even relate to yourself let alone to anyone else. You have no north and south. No right or left. You don’t know how to think and you don’t know what you think. Now that I have remembered things – I think – I wonder if I was better off not knowing.

A transference of memory was occurring as she, the vessel, the source, wrung every small, muffled detail into me, the depository. And once it began, it was difficult to interrupt or stop