All Quotes By Tag: Memory

“But of course, in one sense, Dean never died – his existence is superior to such accidents. One must have heroes, which is to say, one must create them. And they become real through our envy, our devotion. It is we who give them their majesty, their power, which ourselves could never possess. And in turn, they give some back. But they are mortal, these heroes, just as we are. They do not last forever. They fade. They vanish. They are surpassed, forgotten – one hears of them no more.”

“The day she was going to tell her aunts about the boy she had met.She had come home, having forgotten it was her birthday. Time was both important and irrelevant in the woods; stars marked seasonal changes, the moon waxed and waned, the solstices were strictly observed… but normal days and weeks and months weren’t.”

“Trauma is a time traveller, an ouroboros that reaches back and devours everything that came before.”

“It’s just a memory of another time and place. Memories can’t hurt anyone, unless they are shared.”

“If we take the time to unravel the surreptitious fragments from the past that are veiled in the muddle and jumble of our memory, we may single out the essentials for the present that might be best shots for the future. (Never looking back again”, )”

“Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. Its marks, its scars, its wounds from old wars and the walking backwards days all fell away. In its absence it left an aura, a palpable shimmering that was as plain to see as the water in a river or the sun in the sky. As plain to feel as the heat on a hot day, or the tug of a fish on a taut line. So obvious that no one noticed.”

“There’s a reason we live in time. We are too small a flask […] to tolerate too much knowing. Instead, truth must drip through us as through a pipette, to allow only moments of apprehension. Moments diffuse and miniature enough to be survived.”

“What had Old Joe Hunt answered when I knowingly claimed that history was the lies of the victors? “As long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.” Do we remember that enough when it comes to our private lives?”

“Who among us dares to assert that our memories are not tainted by time, sweetest poison and bitterest antidote, untrustworthy ally, and reliable annihilator?”

“The other day, I happened to walk through it. I had a strange sensation. Not that time had passed, but that another me, a twin, was prowling around there — down to the smallest detail, and until the end of time — through what I had experienced over a very short period.”

“Just wake up and see that all the past is only a memory. In the flow of time, all events are dissolving.”

“Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the moment back as its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.”

“One cannot skip time, but only transcend it through innumerable memories that exemplifies human understanding.”

“Jarred once again by her memory, Ted felt the pressure that arose in him when he tried to talk about his work – a confusion about what had originally driven him to disappoint his parents and rack up mountainous debt so he could write a dissertation claiming (in breathless tones that embarrassed him now) that Cézanne’s distinctive brushstrokes were an effort to represent sound – namely, in his summer landscapes, the hypnotic chant of locusts. ‘I’m writing about the impact of Greek sculpture on the French Impressionists,’ he said, attempting liveliness, but it landed like a brick.” (p. 219)”

“And then the finale, its four modest notes. Do, re, fa, mi: half a jumbled scale. Too simple to be called invented. But the thing spills out into the world like one of those African antelopes that fall from the womb, still wet with afterbirth but already running. Young Peter props up on his elbows, ambushed by a memory from the future. The shuffled half scale gathers mass; it sucks up other melodies into its gravity. Tunes and countertunes split off and replicate, chasing each other in a cosmic game of tag. At two minutes, a trapdoor opens beneath the boy. The first floor of the house dissolves above a gaping hole. Boy, stereo, speaker boxes, the love seat he sits on: all hang in place, floating on the gusher of sonority pouring into the room. […] All he wants to do forever is to take the magnificent timepiece apart and put its meshed gears back together again. To recover that feeling of being clear, present, here, various and vibrant, as huge and noble as an outer planet.”