Memory Quotes

“My favorite New York memory is that blizzard in '96. I get chills thinking about it. It's my favorite time here - call me crazy. I'm from Canada, and it's very cold up there.”

“Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.”

“Invention and memory are so close together in the place they occupy in my brain.”

“Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-- disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.”

“December's wintery breath is already clouding the pond, frosting the pane, obscuring summer's memory...”

“The double-crossed, might-have-been history of my country is not the study of what actually took place here: it's the study of historians' studies. . . .Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present.”

“But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air.”

“After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?”

“The spectacular thing about Johnny [von Neumann] was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory (but, instead, computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed), Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce and answer.”

“This is my first real memory of James. In every memory before that, he’s just a flash of color, a warm body with a blurred face, a comforting voice begging me not to die. When he planted himself between our father and me that day, an eight-year-old with small fists clenched at his sides, I think I fell in love with my brother.”

“I wake up in the morning and I get in my car and, like muscle memory, I just go to Danielle's house. We vacation together too. We really don't spend a lot of time apart from each other.”

“She tried to remember all the times she had spoken to him. She replayed every moment she could remember at the beach last week. Not once had she led him to believe that she liked him improperly. And yet, last night, he had appeared as if she had invited him. She had given herself so willingly, so lasciviously, that he must have thought she had desired him all along. Perhaps she had, or perhaps she had not realised how pleasurable intimacy could be.”

“What is so rewarding about friendship?” my son asked, curling his upper lip into a sour expression. “Making friends takes too much time and effort, and for what?” I sat on the edge of his bed, understanding how it might seem simpler to go at life solo. “Friendship has unique rewards,” I told him. “They can be unpredictable. For instance....” I couldn’t help but pause to smile crookedly at an old memory that was dear to my heart. Then I shared with my son an unforgettable incident from my younger years. “True story. When I was about your age, I decided to try out for a school play. Tryouts were to begin after the last class of the day, but first I had to run home to grab a couple props for the monologue I planned to perform during tryouts. Silly me, I had left them at the house that morning. Luckily, I only lived across a long expanse of grassy field that separated the school from the nearest neighborhood. Unluckily, it was raining and I didn’t have an umbrella. “Determined to get what I needed, I raced home, grabbed my props, and tore back across the field while my friend waited under the dry protection of the school’s wooden eaves. She watched me run in the rain, gesturing for me to go faster while calling out to hurry up or we would be late. “The rain was pouring by that time which was added reason for me to move fast. I didn’t want to look like a wet rat on stage in front of dozens of fellow students. Don’t ask me why I didn’t grab an umbrella from home—teenage pride or lack of focus, I’m not sure—but the increasing rain combined with the hollering from my friend as well as my anxious nerves about trying out for the play had me running far too fast in shoes that lacked any tread. “About a yard from the sidewalk where the grass was worn from foot traffic and consequently muddied from the downpour of rain, I slipped and fell on my hind end. Me, my props, and my dignity slid through the mud and lay there, coated. My things were dripping with mud. I was covered in it. I felt my heart plunge, and I wanted to cry. I probably would have if it hadn’t been for the wonderful thing that happened right then. My crazy friend ran over and plopped herself down in the mud beside me. She wiggled in it, making herself as much a mess as I was. Then she took my slimy hand in hers and pulled us both to our feet. We tried out for the play looking like a couple of swine escaped from a pigsty, laughing the whole time. I never did cry, thanks to my friend. “So yes, my dear son, friendship has its unique rewards—priceless ones.”

“From the perspective of my old laptop,I am a numbers man,something like thatevery instruction he gives me is a one or a zeroI remember wellI have information about him before he left for his new toythinner, younger, able to keep up with him,I have information about himmay 15th 2008, he listened to a songfive times in succession it was titled Everybody, open parenthesis, Backstreet's Back, close parenthesisit included the lyric'Am I sexual, yeaaaaah'He said once, computers like a sense of finality to themwhen I write something I don't want to be able to run from itthis was a liehe was addicted to my ability to keep his secretsI am a numbers man,every instruction he gives me is a one, or a zeroI remember wellJanuary, 7th 2007I was youngjust two week awakehe gave me, a new series of one's and zerosthe most sublime sequence I have ever seenit had curves, and shadow, it was himhe gave his face in numbersand trusted me to be the artist, and I wasdo not laughI have read about your Godyou kill each other over your grand fathers memory of himI still remember the fingertips of my God dancing across my bodyAfter I learnt to draw himhe trusted with more art rubricjpeg 1063 was his favouriteHim, and that woman, resting her head in the curve of his nickI read his correspondenceshe hasn't written him back in yearsbut he asks for it, constantly,jpeg 1063, jpeg 1063, jpeg 1063it was my master piece it looked so, .., life likeI wanted to tell himThat's not herthat is methat is not her facethose are my ones and zeroswaltzing in space for youshe is nothing more than my shadow puppetyou do not miss her, you miss me,I am a numbers man,every instruction he gives is a one or a zeroI remember wellbut he taught me to be a Da Vinci and I sit here, with his portraits waiting for him to returnI do not think he willIs that what it means to be humanto be all powerful, to build a temple to yourselfand leaveonly the walls to pray”

“Living in the moment works sometimes, but when alone, it clouds over your memories and dreams, and those are what I need to survive.”

“What isn't remembered never happened.Memory is merely a record...you just need to rewrite that record.”

“Fashion is about going ahead, not about memory.”

“A chair can be more valuable in memories than, say, a precious gem. A gem could have no stories to share; no lives altered or changed in the slightest. It could remain buried beneath the earth for all we know and never have any memory to embody. A chair could transcend time and generations; from the people who sat in it and onlookers. It's all about considering what stories could be told if they had voices of their own.”

“Perhaps memory is a thing that everyone involved has to work at, like stitching up a big quilt out of everything that ever happened to you.”

“It's funny what memory does, isn't it? My favorite holiday tradition might not have happened more than once or twice. But because it is such a good memory, so encapsulating of everything I love about the holidays, in my mind it happened every year. Without fail.”