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Memory Quotes

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Memory Quotes

“The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map.”

MemoryMemoirMothersHolocaust
Book:Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust: A Mother-Daughter Journey to Reclaim the Past
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“My earliest memory is of sitting at my mother's feet. She was standing with her shoes on either side of me. I think I must have been a baby. I don't think I could walk yet. She was wearing a long skirt. It was windy and her skirt draped over me, then blew away, then draped over me again. She was standing above me, and above her was the sky. I felt how I might inside a cathedral. Her legs were like stone pillars. Her skirt like an altar veil. I felt guarded by her. I thought of her as the sun.”

SunChildhoodMemoryMothersMoms
Book:Interesting Facts about Space
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“Apabila seorang manusia terpisah dengan orang yang dia cintai, ingatannya terhadap orang itu pasti akan pudar juga. Sedikit demi sedikit. Malangnya, lompong kosong yang hilang mendadak dalam hati itu tidak akan begitu mudah diabaikan. Lompong itu akan menuntut manusia mengisinya. Akhirnya si manusia terpaksa akur lalu melengkapkannya menggunakan apa-apa sahaja yang tinggal. Menggunakan memori.”

LoveMemorySeparation
Book:Mawaddah Ilmi Ingin Pulang
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“The notion that where one is from can be understood using what remains of that place opens up a highly sensitive and rich terrain that can help unpack belonging, especially if that place has now been rendered inaccessible by national borders.”

FamilyIndiaMemorySeparationPakistanRefugeeMigrationBorder1947
Book:Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory
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“When the night is as long as the day, then the storms of the equinox begin to get up, when artificial light is as strong as the violence of the sun, then the passion for gambling is unleashed, when two women equal each other in your mind, then the equinox of pleasure begins. For some, life is interminable, and what is interminable no longer makes sense. How are they to find time to live? For others, life is over right from the outset. It has ended before it has begun. It unfolds on a sort of abstract strip, without any temporal dimension. In this way, some lives sacrifice their own ends uselessly, and lose even the memory of their origins. If there were a secret, no one, not even the person who knew it, would be able to divulge it. We must keep watching, from the depths of a definitive silence, for the definitive event.”

SecretSacrificeMemoryImmortality
Book:Cool memories
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“In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person's existence. Just as the human body returned to dust, mingling with atoms of the natural world, a person's existence would return to nothingness. How very clean. Now, as if in belated punishment for the invention of writing, any message once posted on the Internet was immortal. Words as numerous as the dust of the earth would linger forever in their millions and trillions and quadrillions and beyond.”

WritingDeathInternetMemoryDustImmortalityJapanMortalityForgettingAnthropologyFinitudeDigital ImmortalityDigital AnthropologyQuadrillions
Book:Inheritance from Mother
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“May the ears of Canada never grow deaf to the plea of widows and orphans and our crippled men for care and support. May the eyes of Canada never be blind to that glorious light which shines upon our young national life from the deeds of those "who counted not their lives dear unto themselves," and may the lips of Canada never be dumb to tell to future generations the tales of heroism which will kindle the imagination and fire the patriotism of children that are yet unborn.”

LoveWarHopeSacrificeDutyMemoryCanadaPatriotismHonourHeroismWorld War 1
Author:Frederick George Scott
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“Cardan comes over, stepping on my star chart, kicking over the ink-pot with his silver-tipped boots, sending the blood spilling across the paper, blotting out my marks. 'Come with me,' he says imperiously. 'I knew you liked her,' says Locke. 'That's why I had to have her first. Do you remember the party in my maze garden? How I kissed her while you watched?' 'I recall that your hands were on her, but her eyes were on me,' Cardan returns. 'That's not true!' I insist, but I remember Cardan on a blanket with a daffodil-haired faerie girl. She pressed her lips to the edge of his boot, and another girl kissed his throat. His gaze had turned to me when one of them began kissing his mouth. His eyes were coal-bright, wet as tar. The memory comes with the slide of Locke's palm over my back, heat in my cheeks, and the feeling my skin was too tight, that everything was too much.”

DreamMemoryHolly BlackThe Folk Of The AirJude DuarteCardan GreenbriarJudeCardanThe Queen Of NothingLocke
Book:The Queen of Nothing
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“The cloudless day is richer at its close; A golden glory settles on the lea; Soft, stealing shadows hint of cool repose To mellowing landscape, and to calming sea. And in that nobler, gentler, lovelier light, The soul to sweeter, loftier bliss inclines; Freed form the noonday glare, the favour’d sight Increasing grace in earth and sky divines. But ere the purest radiance crowns the green, Or fairest lustre fills th’ expectant grove, The twilight thickens, and the fleeting scene Leaves but a hallow’d memory of love!”

LoveRomanceNatureBeautySadnessSkyMemoryMelancholyTwilightForestPantheismReminiscenceLove LostLustre
Author:H. P. Lovecraft
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“At the edge you will always remember me, at the edge you will last be remembered, where sanity and insanity come together, for the time, then separates. Like leaves on October trees, that color the world, but for a moment, then leave. At the edge, where life losses its edginess, and thoughts we will become one, someday. At the edge the sun drops, the ring falls, and senses of raindrops climb upwards to the gray sky.”

WorldLoveLifePainTogetherRememberDeathLossMarriageSunSkyColorMemorySensesInsanityInstantGraySanityTreesFalling DownOctoberOneRaindropsLeavesLastEdgeSeparateRingEdginessUpward
Author:Anthony Liccione
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“You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper. The fire isn't thinking 'Oh, this is Kant,' or 'Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,' or 'Nice tits,' while it burns. To the fire, they're nothing but scraps of paper. It's the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there's no distinction--they're all just fuel.”

LifeMemory
Book:After Dark
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“How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richard's kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons. Couldn’t they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself. Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That's who I was. This is who I am--a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port. Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the pond's edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened to hers; (exciting and utterly familiar, she'd never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. They'd kissed and walked around the pond together. It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.”

HappinessMemory
Book:The Hours
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“Do you remember what we just did? Please tell me you remember what we just did." She briefly toyed with the idea of lying and saying no, just to see the look on his face, but she'd had enough of having her brain played with – it wouldn't be too sporting to do the same to him. "Yes, I remember, and don't you think for one minute that just because you had me on my back screaming I was 'yours'," she waved four fingers in quotation marks in front of his face, "that it gives you any kind of ownership over me, because it doesn't." He looked annoyed, then relieved, then he laughed. "Yeah, whatever, baby.”

HumorHumourMemoryOwnershipMaking LoveSubmissionRememberingPueblo And Amy
Book:The Sands Of Time
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