Memory Quotes - Page 16

He had a clear, lyrical voice and his songs remained in her ears long after the music had ended.

Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.

88% of what we call good songs aren’t really good. They merely remind us of a good time we once had.

From key signature to coda, from downbeat to the sound of life's final fermata, our pasts set the tone for all that was, that is, and that ever would
be.

But what was good tween us must have been nothing but bodies, she say. Cause I don't know the Albert that don't dance, can't hardly laugh, never talk bout nothing, beat you and hid your sister Nettie's letters. Who he?

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

I'd been feeling like this for a while, the continual looking back, the stuckness of it all. I blamed it on the coming New Year, only four and a half months away, when the clocks would read zero and we would start again, could start again, but I knew we wouldn't. Nothing would. The world would be the same, just a little bit worse.

We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.

My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain...There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory.

I don't believe everything happens for a reason. But I still search for reasons anyway. It's like I don't want to admit that maybe everything really is totally random...that people are just molecules in the air, bumping into each other and floating away again."
-p150, NOTES TO SELF

Some people would never forget certain people, a few people would remember everyone, and most of us would mostly be forgotten.

Sometimes things just slip past you, into your hands and out through your fingers. In my half-in/half-out state I began to wonder if that could happen to people, too.

When she was a child,
my love carried a road map in her hand
the way other girls carried handkerchiefs.

Amicitiae nostrae memoriam spero sempiternam fore

I'll remember you... I remember everyone I've lost.

To Savor The Scene, A Book, or A Friend.

One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.

How awful it was, thought Tessa, remembering Fats the toddler, the way tiny ghosts of your living children haunted your heart; they could never know, and would hate it if they did, how their growing was a constant bereavement.

You're bigger than I remember," she said stupidly.
"You too," he said. "I also remember that you were beautiful."
"Memory does play tricks on us."
"No. Your face is the same, but I don't remember what beautiful means anymore. Come on. Let's go out into the lake.

We enshrine things to memory very differently than we experience them in real time. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has coined a couple of terms to make the distinction. He talks about the "experiencing self" versus the "remembering self.