My memory is good for some things and not others.

As we age we begin to grasp at youthful bliss like a life raft in a sea of harsh reality.

Geschichten sind unser Gedächtnis, Bibliotheken die Lagerstätten für dieses Gedächtnis und Lesen das Handwerk, mit dem wir dieses Gedächtnis neu erschaffen können, indem wir es rezitieren und glossieren, es wieder in unsere eigene Erfahrung rückübersetzen...

Loss alone is but the wounding of a heart; it is memory that makes it our ruin.

For years I’d been trying to forget…, locking it up and burying it deep in my memory. The journey… had shattered that, bringing it all back – but now that I’d faced it, I found...

Yes, that’s how it was then, that part there we called ‘France’”. I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes.

If it were not my purpose to combine barbarian things with things Hellenic, to traverse and civilize every continent, to search out the uttermost parts of land and sea, to push the bounds of Macedonia...

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly...

When all is lost, there is still a memory.

[M]any people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades...

Little girl, a memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure-an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment:is it not?

We seldom know what we’re hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience...

I can’t say why some memories float and other sink.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.These memories, which are my life–for we possess nothing certainly except the past–were always with me. Like the pigeons of...

We were still young enough to remember the cubist architecture of the piles of corpses we had seen during the war.

It was one of those strange moments that came to him rarely, but never left. A moment that stamped itself on heart and brain, instantly recallable in every detail, for all of his life. There...

Memory, when it juts, retreats, recovers, shows us how to hold the darkness, how to breathe.

És agora que uma verdadeira mulher, disse, e tratou de me mudar a roupa. Sentia-me a morrer e ela mudava-me a roupa, calmamente. Acharam que devia ficar um dia de cama. Por ser a primeira...

(…) always regretted that good memory often prevents us from thinking for ourselves.

Alzheimer’s is the cleverest thief, because she not only steals from you, but she steals the very thing you need to remember what’s been stolen.

Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly...

But you play that passage like it’s the -memory- of love. You’re so young, yet you know desertion, abandonment. That’s why you play that third movement the way you do. Most cellists, they play it...

She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing “happens.” That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer...

We lose track of everything, and of everyone, even ourselves. The facts of my father’s life are less known to me than those of the life of Hadrian. My own existence, if I had to...

I Came away from the U.S. Memory Championship eager to find out how Ed and Lukas did it. Were these just extraordinary individuals, pridigies from the long tail of humanity’s bell curve, or was there...

Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn’t flat or linear....

If you are never frightened, sir, you would never find out what you was made of and what you was capable of doing. You would never become a better man than what you started out...

A silent velvet footstep filled me, unwelcome yet so needed. You finally found my hidden shore with grains of time and ocean of the most secret secrets, violet and red; left a trail of deep...

Tell the truth because then you don’t have to have a good memory.

Memory is curated. All this paraphernalia you collect to ward off forgetting

tout aboutit en un livre,” everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is...

The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.

Love is motion Potter love is forward movement but you said yourself the memory reel backward it’s all backward with you. You are stuck back there because Potter you don’t let yourself move forward your...

We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things; and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.

…I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.

… And the boy whose hair remained the color of lemons forever.

Some things are not supposed to be forgotten; these are the things which make us human.

Memory is not a storage place but a story we tell ourselves in retrospect. As such, it is made of storytelling materials: embroidery and forgery, perplexity and urgency, revelation and darkness.

Perhaps memory is like a bucket; if you want to cram into it more fruit than it will hold, the fruit is crushed.

My short-term factual memory can be like water; events are a brief disturbance on the surface and then it closes back up again, as if nothing ever touched it. But it’s a strange fact that...

Memory, I must suppose, if it is neglected becomes like a box room, or a lumber room in an old house, the contents jumbled about, maybe not only from neglect but also from too much...

I’ve worked hard to remember it…The problem is I’m not sure what’s real memory and what’s my brain filling in details, like a guy whose heart stops and he thinks he sees a bright light....

He remembered how nice the kids at Camp Half-Blood had been to him after the war with Kronos. Great job, Nico! Thanks for bringing the armies of the Underworld to save us! Everybody smiled. They...

The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness....

As dye soaks fibres, drawn into them to change their colour forever, so does a memory, stinging or sweet, change the fibre of a man’s character.

My car is full of random stains.

Des années après que mon frère avait déserté ma chambre, après avoir mis en terre tous ceux qui m’étaient chers, j’offrai enfin à Simon la sépulture à laquelle il n’avait jamais eu droit. Il allait...

What the dead don’t know piles up, though we don’t notice it at first. They don’t know how we’re getting along without them, of course, dealing with the hours and days that now accrue so...

Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?

If you are working on two things at once, you have to get the first thing out of your memory before you work on the next one. So you’re switching in and out.