Best 1492 quotes in «memory quotes» category

It is a political fight between a group of well-financed, well-organized people whose freedom, livelihood, finances, reputations, or liberty is being threatened by disclosures of child sexual abuse and--on the other hand--a group of well-meaning, ill-organized, underfinanced, and often terribly naive academics who expect fair play.

It is better, perhaps, to be thought of as a fiction than to be discarded from memory completely.

It is difficult for anyone to watch someone close suffer. The grief comes from not understanding the pain, and from knowing that suffering, even when it ends, will live on as memory. A child does not, and should not, understand her parents' memories, yet this incomprehension does not offer exemption. The child in every one of us carries the burden of memory's melodrama, not only our own, but those before our time.

It is dangerous to use our own ability to access non-traumatic memories as a standard against which we judge a trauma victim’s response.

It is easy, fast, to fight and die beside your brothers in the sun. It is harder to build, to teach, to live, and to remember.

It is idle to say there is no such garden. Everyone recognises the same nostalgia... Paradise is neither a moment nor a place; it is a condition. So when the lover calls to his or her beloved to come into the garden, it is, in the final implication, a summons to overcome to human condition.

[I]t is precisely such a paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia - for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled.

It is warm, I am alive, I am calm and sad, I hardly know why. In this existence so even, so tranquil, and so gentle as I have here, I am in an element that weakens me morally while strengthening me physically; and I fall into melancholies of honey and roses which are none the less melancholy. It seems to me that all those I love forget me, and that it is justice, because I live a selfish life having nothing to do for any one of them.

It may not seem like much - a few kisses in the dark - but it was enough to burn a hole like an ulcer in my heart.

I try to remember everything, every thing, but sometimes I forget something. I don’t even know what it is sometimes, but I know it’s not coming to me, something about him isn’t coming to me and when that happens, when a piece is missing, it makes me crazy. I don’t know what to do with that.

I try and reconstruct them from faded photographs and a few letters which survived the holocaust and my emigration to England nearly half a century ago. Their world has become submerged in the past, like Atlantis, and they have taken my childhood with them.

It's amazing how people can find all the mistakes in the world concerning another person, but look into the mirror every day without making changes within. Stop looking down your nose at others, What does that achieve? We all can make room for improvements. Most of the time it starts with a little attitude adjustment.

It seemed like it was always autumn in this field - it was fitting really. Everything was shaded with the bronzes and yellows of faded pictures from an old photo album, it was a realm where uncomfortable nostalgia reigned. I noticed it more after my experience in the dream. There I was an actor in the play, here I was a spectator.

It shouldn't work. It shouldn't be magic. You shouldn't weep happy and then sad and then happy again. But you do. And I do. And we all do.

It's late at night when the memory comes for me, like it always seems to when the relief of sleep seems ready to draw me under.

It’s like a broken bone that never healed quite right. An ache that I feel on cold days when the chill of your memory dances up and down my spine, taunting me with the way it can still induce pain, even after all this time.

It’s the intricate details you miss the most. For me, it’s the soft lines around the eyes when he smiles… Or that look he gave me sometimes that I cannot begin to describe - but I would know it if I saw it again. It was the look that gave him away. I’d know that look anywhere… It used to be my everything.

It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

It terrified me that one day I might not be the person I was; that one day I might not even remember who I used to be. Like I said, maybe it makes me a horrible person, but I think anyone who says they’re not afraid of the future is lying.

It tugs at me, filling me with the kind of seasick nostalgia that can hit you in the gut when you find an old concert ticket in your purse or an old coin machine ring you got down at the boardwalk on a day when you went searching for mermaids in the surf with your best friend. That punch of nostalgia hits me now and I start to sink down on the sky-coloured quilt, feeling the nubby fabric under my fingers, familiar as the topography of my hand.

It was as though each of us—in separate and distinct ways—had been plunged back into the past. Fragments of old memories were coming back at unexpected moments... Old ghosts awoke, stirred angrily into life by this girl, like a wasp's nest struck with a stick.

It was haunted; but real hauntings have nothing to do with ghosts finally; they have to do with the menace of memory.

It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh.

It would cut into him at unpredictable moments, like a gutting knife made of colored light.

I've just come to my room, Livy darling, I guess this was the memorable night of my life. By George, I never was so stirred since I was born. I heard four speeches which I can never forget... one by that splendid old soul, Col. Bob Ingersoll, — oh, it was just the supremest combination of English words that was ever put together since the world began... How handsome he looked, as he stood on that table, in the midst of those 500 shouting men, and poured the molten silver from his lips! What an organ is human speech when it is played by a master! How pale those speeches are in print, but how radiant, how full of color, how blinding they were in the delivery! It was a great night, a memorable night. I doubt if America has seen anything quite equal to it. I am well satisfied I shall not live to see its equal again... Bob Ingersoll’s music will sing through my memory always as the divinest that ever enchanted my ears. And I shall always see him, as he stood that night on a dinner-table, under the flash of lights and banners, in the midst of seven hundred frantic shouters, the most beautiful human creature that ever lived... You should have seen that vast house rise to its feet; you should have heard the hurricane that followed. That's the only test! People might shout, clap their hands, stamp, wave their napkins, but none but the master can make them get up on their feet. {Twain's letter to his wife, Livy, about friend Robert Ingersoll's incredible speech at 'The Grand Banquet', considered to be one of the greatest oratory performances of all time}

I want everyone that has been abused by someone in their childhood to know that you can get past it. Having DID is not the end of the world; it's the beginning of your new life. DID allows the victim of exceptional abuse the ability to “forget” the abuse and continue living. Without it, I may have gone crazy as a teen and spent my life in a as a teen and spent my life in a psychiatric hospital.

I want to remember what we were like before we became ourselves.

I was going to be a memory when I grew up.

I was right when I said a very long time ago that our age would leave few living documents behind it: it was rare for anyone to keep a diary, letters were short and businesslike--"I'm alive and well"--and few memoirs were written. There are many reasons for this. Let me mention just one, not perhaps recognized by everybody: we were too often at loggerheads with our own past to give it proper thought. Within the half-century, our ideas on people and events have changed many times; conversations were broken off in mid-sentence; thoughts and feelings could not but be affected by circumstances.

I was reminded of the old pain, a pain once so intense it was physical.

I was the first face you saw when you were born, you were bald as my hair ran black. Now yours the last face I saw before I died, your hair ran black, as I was bald.

I was talking about time. It`s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it`s just my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it`s not. [...] What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don`t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. [...] Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it`s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It`s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.

I went to Maui to stay a week and remained five. I never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place goodbye so regretfully. I have not once thought of business, or care or human toil or trouble or sorrow or weariness, and the memory of it will remain with me always.

I will always believe in you. And that’s more powerful than memory.

I will be waiting for you at the end of every blind alley, under the lonely streetlamps of a city that will no longer be ours. When the wind grows colder and the huge piles of settled leaves sit there for a week or two, unshielded from the curious gaze of passersby, I will be waiting for you. I will be waiting for what could have been and for what will never be; For the letters that never arrived, the letters that were never sent, and the letters that will never be written.

I will keep no further journal of that same hesternal torch‐light ; and, to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I tear out the remaining leaves of this volume...

I wish I could have shown you that engineheart- the system of pieces and parts that moved us forward, that moves us forward still. One day, a few weeks after my son’s death, I took the bolt off the casing and opened it up. Just to see how it worked. Opening that heart was like the opening the first page of a book- there were characters (me, the Memory of My Father), there was rhythm and chronology, I saw, in the images, old roads I’d forgotten- and scenes from stories where the VW was just a newborn. I do know that it held a true translation: miles to words, words to notes, notes to time. It was the HEART that converted the pedestrian song of Northampton to something meaningful, and it did so via some sort of fusion: the turtle that howls a bluegrass tune at the edge of Bow Lake becomes a warning in the VW heart…and that’s just the beginning- the first heart layer. It will take years and years of study, and the energy of every single living thing, to understand the tiny minds and roads in the subsequent layers, the mechanics at work to make every single heartmoment turn together… The point is, this WAS always the way it was supposed to be. Even I could see that the Volkswagen heart was wired for travel-genetically coded. His pages were already written-as are mine and yours. Yes, yours too! I am looking into your eyes right now and I am reading your life, and I am excited/sorry for what the road holds for you. It’s going to be amazing/really difficult. You’ll love/loathe every minute of it!

I wish nights like this weren't so fragile and slippery and impossible to nail down for study in one's leisure. But the really great nights pass through you like whispers or shadows. They shimmer, but don't adhere.

I wonder sometimes if the thoughts that flock my nightmares are abandoned memories coming home to roost.

Listen. You know what it's like when you're in a room with the light on and then suddenly the light goes out? I'll show you. It's like this." He turns out the light. BLACKOUT

Look at how far astray the man’s adoration had led him—so many misguided betrayals, each of them a burnt offering at the altar of her memory. But now you could sense the dawning realization that he had built a flawed temple to a false god.

looking at my reflection, in the window opposite, hollow and translucent, I see a woman disappearing. It would help if I looked like that in real life – if the more the disease advanced, the more ‘see-through’ I became until, eventually, I would be just a wisp of a ghost. How much more convenient it would be, how much easier for everyone, including me, if my body just melted away along with my mind. Then we’d all know where we were, literally and metaphysically.

…Look, I’m real sorry about Cheryl, I know you loved her a lot,” Mandy apologized gloomily. “It’s wrong that people have to keep killing off Pollution.” “It’s alright, I think she wants to be remediated,” Alecto told her calmly, though his grief-stricken and depressed expression said more to Mandy than his words did. “You don’t have to forget Cheryl, no matter what Mearth said to you,” Mandy pointed out. “People shouldn’t be forced to forget what they love, or to just get over the death of what they love. Cheryl was your friend and nobody can make you forget her if you don’t want to.

Looking at things is never time wasted. If your children want to stand and stare, let them. When I was marvelling at the beauty of a painting or enjoying a great view it did not occur to me that the experience, however intense, would be of value many years later. But there it has remained, tucked away in hidden bits of my mind and now it comes, shouldering aside even the most passionate love affairs.

Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.

Lou sat on the dock and stared into the blue depths of Waterton Lake to where a figure floated under the surface. It was the woman who’d walked into Emerald Bay, her pockets full of stones, but in the dream, the woman’s face was a mirror of Lou’s own.

Love doesn't come with an on-off switch. It's made of too many threads of memory and hope and heartache that weave themselves into the very core of who you are.

Love for the beauty of the soul. I shall love you always. When the flower of life has gone, ever I shall find you. When all is lost and winter comes, I shall be your spring time. And memory fades and wilts then, I shall always find you.... I shall always find you....

Love happens only once, what happens after that is just compromise; with your heart and with your life...

Love is inaudible—until you hear it. And once you do, you’ll never forget the sound of her voice.