Memories Quotes - Page 12

All forms of writing are an act of conception; writing must lead to creation. Each time that we write, we begin again. Writing is an act of self-affirmation. Each time that we place our thoughts onto paper, we receive a new opportunity to claim our reality. Writing is also an act of explication and deconstruction. Writing empowers us to shape and modify our fiery constitutions. Writing allows us to explore the essential ingredients that lead to a life of serenity by exhibiting compassion, love, patience, generosity, and forgiveness.

The fear of not being remembered is a dangerous thing.

Lacking natural equilibrium, I used writing as an illustrative means to center myself in a world filled with haziness and uncertainty. My self-drafted obituary will not bemoan death but shall celebrate life by giving heartfelt thanks for all the people that brightened actuality with their kindness, friendship, noble acts of charity, and expressions of universal goodwill. It was a privilege to exist in this wrinkle of time with many people devoted to burnishing the sharpen edges of life. The heavens blessed me with many years to discover why it is beautiful to live and die in a world where the hills and wind, the rivers and seas, stars and moon, and revealing sunlight shall persevere.

Things, events, that occupy space yet come to an end when someone dies make us stop in wonder - and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man's or woman's death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested. In the course of time there was one day that closed the last eyes that had looked on Christ; the battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with the death of one man. What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernández, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?

Some memories are meant for not to be said, either they are too Scary to tell, or we love them that much, that we can’t explain those in oral words

My mind is like a room where the door swings free in the breeze, and many visitors come and go and stay and vanish as they will.

Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.

When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

Eleanor had heard talk of the rebellion that existed inside the city of Constance before. Most of the information she gathered was considered an old fairy tale by the general public. There were a few stories here and there about people angered by their present living conditions, who had demanded that the center of Constance be held responsible for it. However, information was never passed between the five different sectors. Over the years the tales of the rebellion had become children’s bedtime stories, and people did not take them seriously.

Time can heal and time can help forgive and forget because in time the memories fade. The time will go so slow so fast and love will stay if it's right.

You know, memories. They're all I've got.

It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed, light-intoxicated clouds that lay on the skyline in attendant veils. Behind us, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent withdrawal and the river turned to flame in a quiet duel of gold....The new gold of moon astonishing and ascendant, he depleted gold of sunset extinguishing itself in the long westward slide, it was the old dance of days in the Carolina marshes, the breathtaking death of days before the eyes of children, until the sun vanished, its final signature a ribbon of bullion strung across the tops of water oaks.

But with the morning almost gone, with seven bodachs in the recreation room, with living boneyards stalking the storm, with Death opening the door to a luge chute and inviting me to go for a bobsled ride, I didn't have time to put on a victim suit and tell the woeful tale of my sorrowful childhood. Neither time nor the inclination

You begin with other people's memories and end up with your own.

You can order yourself to treasure a moment, to cling tight to a feeling and never let it fade, but it’s your brain, that three-pound lump of hamburger, that makes the final call.

Memories are fragile, you try to grab them and they skitter away in various directions. Trying to gather them together to write them out is difficult, they resist, get clouded and escape as wisps of smoke. Nothing seems as crystal clear as it once was, a milky film of opacity envelopes everything. Odd details stand out in one’s mind, not a continuum. A fragrance, an odour, the smell of toast burning perhaps or whiff of jasmine, a shade of pink, a flower pressed between the pages of a book, brings on a sharp burst of memories that drown you with their immediacy.

You stop revisiting memories when you outgrow the people you made them with.

Arms wrapped around me, I looked over the past boxed up and piled haphazardly about, like memories in a person’s brain. It was only a matter of knowing where a thought was and dusting it off.

Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.

There is redemption in sadness. It tells me that for nearly five months in 2003, I lived life with the open, raw, refreshing outlook of the young. The payoff, though difficult to quantify, is much greater than I expected. I have no regrets about having gone -- it was the right thing to do. I think about it every day. Sometimes I can hardly believe it happened. I just quit -- and I was on a monumental trip. I didn't suffer financial ruin, my wife didn't leave me, the world didn't stop spinning. I do think of how regrettable it would have been had I ignored the pull that I felt to hike the trail. A wealth of memories could have been lost before they had even occurred if I had dismissed as a whim my inkling to hike. It is disturbing how tenuous our potential is due to our fervent defense of the comfortable norm.

Your actions show what you know, and your replies to obstacles give clarity into what you will learn.

Only if the human mind had a Garbage Collector.But then, do we know what references we still hold on?

[M]any people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn't true. Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.

We humans are different - our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them, our recollections in their retelling.

I don't remember much, which is a kind of mercy,I suppose. I see it in patterns.Sometimes it's like a scribble on a wall- no matter how many times you paint over it, a bit of it always comes through, but not enough to put together the whole.I try not to think about it too much.

We want so badly to be happy – to live the kinds of lives that we always hoped we’d live – that we give gifts to ourselves by remembering things not as they were, but as we wish they were.

I’d never dreamed anybody could love me the way he did. And even when he proved it to me time and again – I still could hardly believe it was true.

The biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three on them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4, and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in a hurry to get on to the next things: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.

In my dreams I come face to face with myriad reflections of myself, all unknown and passing strange. They speak unending in languages not my own and walk with companions I have never met, in places my steps have never gone. In my dreams I walk worlds where forests crowd my knees and half the sky is walled ice. Dun herds flow like mud, vast floods tusked and horned surging over the plain, and lo, they are my memories, the migrations of my soul.

You live through each memory you have hidden inside me. Through the places, we had been to and through the songs, which only we have sung and heard. Every night, I lie down and look at the sky gazing the universe in its eye. Watching the breeze and the stars carry the pieces of us and deliver it to the infinity and every time I wonder if you are doing the same somewhere.

You can miss places. You can miss people.Just know that what you’re really missing is the way things were. And even if you could go there again…. see them again…. you can’t go back.They’re not the same.You’re not the same.The loss of them changed you.

The whole fairground with all its memories would soon be smashed into the dust.

...someone ought to invent a tool, a kind of plane to shave the lies away from stories and deception away from memories. I'm a collector of shavings.

Some people walk into our lives and leave footprints on our hearts. Others walk into our lives and we want to leave footprints on their face!

Our memories and events in our lives are untidy things. We wish that we can file them away and shut the door, or wish the opposite - that they would stay forever.

You're forgiven."I don't deserve her."But not forgotten," I whisper. She'll never forget what I did. It's not humanly possible. Sometimes I want the impossible. Her expression doesn't change. "My head is undiscriminating with the memories it keeps, but my heart has already forgotten.

As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on--in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.

In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long.

That's the problem with memories: you can visit them but you can't live with them.

It frightens me that I can't do anything sensible about it.""Are you scared that you'll wind up with a boring job where you have to see the same people every day and drink instant coffee?""I'm more scared that I'll forget the feeling I have now.""Kind of like how you forgot how it feels to be three years old.""That surely I'll wind up thinking I was so young, I didn't really understand everything. It bothers me that I know I will be wrong.

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.

He would roam about the world carrying his recollections with him, and perhaps some day he would come to forget them, for one can live only by forgetting; but when his grief should dissolve with the years he would be left an empty man, like a smiling automaton, incapable of any affections other than meterial ones.

God will bring you a gift. However, it is up to you to stop shaking the same box and expecting something wonderful will fall out of it again. After a while, you are going to break that box and it won't remind you of that moment when it meant everything to you.

Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed.

If you help them (the crew) create good memories, they'll forget all the bad stuff

Suddenly, no one, including me, was in Guescheste anymore; they weren't in Miami or Cuba; they weren't in the present, or the future, but floating somewhre in the formless, timeless space of memory.

...her own restless coveting of his love and the slow but sure ebullience of her desire for him; then the Nawab's martydom and her spiritual homelessness and physical loneliness; there was so much, so many portraits and landscapes, like the bright pages of an album of words and pictures. They filled her heart overflowing with the tangy, coppery taste of blood that flows from failure, and pricked her soul with nostalgia, for what was and what could have been. She had never thought that happy memories could come accompanied with so much regret, so much pain, so much repining, and discontent. If you plucked a rose without due care, its thorn pricked you to protest the thoughtlessness and the inconsiderateness you had displayed in taking away its crowning glory. Here, it was nothing else but the rose which was the thorn: its each and every petal was saturated with the scents of the past but it stung like the scorpion plant. But was it possible not to touch those memories? For their scents traveled in and out of your being like breath, and their colours were inside every blink of your eye.

What you remember saves you.

We must treasure our memories just as we cherish our dreams because without dreams and memory human life would be sad, brutal, and meaningless.

Today I wore a pair of faded old jeans and a plain grey baggy shirt. I hadn't even taken a shower, and I did not put on an ounce of makeup. I grabbed a worn out black oversized jacket to cover myself with even though it is warm outside. I have made conscious decisions lately to look like less of what I felt a male would want to see. I want to disappear.

It was one of those rare times when remembering the dead was more inmportant than tending to the needs of the living.

Perhaps the rest of the world was gone. It was the most plausible answer. Heaven knows she couldn’t see or think of anyone else. That must be the answer, they were the only two people left, as the Earth spun into a timeless abyss. Claire once read time doesn’t pass at normal speeds within a black hole. If one were to travel into a black hole for only moments and return again, centuries would have passed. That explained the sensation she felt, once again peering into his dark gaze. She wouldn’t look away; she’d trained herself better than that. Then again, she reasoned, it wasn’t an option. She couldn’t divert her gaze if she wanted. The hold upon her stare was stronger than any ropes or chains made by man. Claire knew from experience, submitting to the hold was her best chance at survival. Fighting was a futile waste of energy.

It seems sometimes that we get so caught up in missing the past, or looking forward to the future, that we forget that this, right here and now, was once the days we longed for and will soon be the ones we miss.

There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.

Your memory feels like home to me.So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds it’s way back to you.

... everyone regrets something, but you can't change the past. You've got to let go and make new memories until the old ones fade enough that they don't hold any power over you.

You don’t deserve my image in your head. You don’t deserve my memories in your chest.

I took up space. I was a collection of cells and memories, awkward limbs and clumsy fashion crimes; I was the repository of my parents' expectations and evidence of their disappointments

In our lives are special moments that live as their own, the rest is movement with the passage of time.

In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.