Quotes about Memory

I watched your snapshot fade for twenty years.

Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions.

I will bend, I will touch the ground, or as close to it as I can get without rupture. I will lay a wreath of invisible money on her grave.

She was something of his own that he had lost.

Then I remembered something I'd seen and hadn't noticed, at the time. It wasn't the army. It was some other army.

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh. And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past

Returning from the dead used to be something I did well I began asking why I began forgetting how

I've cut myself off. I can feel the place where I used o be attached. It's raw, as when you grate your finger. It's a shredded mess of images. It hurts. But where exactly on me is this torn-off stem? Now here, now there. Meanwhile the other girl, the one with the memory, is coming nearer and nearer. She's catching up to me, trailing behind her, like red smoke, the rope we share.

I have to be more careful about my memories, I have to be sure they're my own and not the memories of other people telling me what I felt, how I acted, what I said: if the events are wrong the feelings I remember about them will be wrong too, I'll start inventing them and there will be no way of correcting it, the ones who could help are gone.

The brain is very protective, it decides what we choose to remember.

I collected enough fragments of the past to make a reconstruction of it, which must have borne as much relation to the real thing as a mosaic portrait would to the original.