Memory Quotes - Page 7

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

As usual, he saves his wife's for last. He leans on the cane and he looks at the headstone and he thinks about many things. Taffy. He thinks about taffy. He thinks it would take his teeth out now, but he would eat it anyhow, if it meant eating it with her.

There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote.

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

Time's the thief of memory

Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.

The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.

I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer - and what trees and seasons smelled like - how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich.

Our nemesis is time, against which we have a single ally, memory, and even it betrays us.

The work of memory collapses time.

In the darkness of night,
Demons strut, taunting, goading.
In the light of day,
Angels sing glorious songs.
In the time in between,
We live our lives alone and searching.
And sometimes, softly,
You understand damnation.
All is forgotten, all is lost,
All but forgiveness
And the memory of her kiss.

Any time gone by was better.

People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.

Mostly what you lose with time, in memory, is the specificity of things, their exact sequence. It all runs together, becomes a watery soup. Portmanteau days, imploded years. Like a bad actor, memory always goes for effect, abjuring motivation, consistency, good sense.

The unreality of the past weeks lifted like a fog, but its residue remained. All of the past is like that, but most especially the parts that are out of the ordinary.

Time takes no holiday. It does not roll idly by, but through our senses works its own wonders in the mind. Time came and went from one day to the next; in its coming and its passing it brought me other hopes and other memories. [quoted in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 54]

It is always worth itemizing happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers of happiness while you can.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.