Memories Quotes - Page 18

It was no use to tell a person to forget. No matter how hard you tried to put it out of your mind, the hurt would still be there, festering under the forgetfulness, sending poison through your veins.

She was a ray of sunshine, a warm summer rain, a bright fire on a cold winter’s day, and now she could be dead because she had tried to save the man she loved.

The smells of Christmas are the smells of childhood

It occurred to her that all the bad parts of life, the sad parts, the frightening ones, were meant to be offset by moments and memories like this. She had to be present in it, right here, right now.

I take a picture, but it's not about who is in the picture or the background of it. It's about the memories and meanings it holds.

We talked for four hours. I don't remember most of it, but often a little moment in an unrelated conversation or alone on the street will trigger a memory of it that I didn't know I had. So I know it's all there somewhere.

Our loved ones pass away or simply leave our lives forever too soon, and we think to ourselves, “I wasn’t ready for you to leave. It just wasn’t time,” because we’re never truly ready, because it’s never truly time. So we keep them in our memories.And when we regret that we don’t have more memories of them, maybe our minds give us more gifts; gradually we find ourselves remembering them being with us in times and places that they couldn’t have been, and gradually we stop correcting ourselves because, well, we want them to have been there.

«I’ve never been to a funeral until today. I see dazzling arrangements of red, yellow, and purple flowers with long, green stems. I see a stained-glass window with a white dove, a yellow sun, a blue sky. I see a gold cross, standing tall, shiny, brilliant. And I see black. Black dresses. Black pants. Black shoes. Black bibles. Black is my favorite color. Jackson asked me about it one time.“Ava, why don’t you like pink? Or yellow? Or blue?” ”I love black,” I said. ”It suits me.” ”I suit you,” he said. I’m not so sure I love black anymore.And then, beyond the flowers, beneath the stained-glass window, beside the cross, I see the white casket. I see red, burning love disappear forever. As we pull away, my eyes stay glued to the casket. It’s proof that sometimes life does not go on. I look around. If tears could bring him back, there’d be enough to bring him back a hundred times. That’s not what I’m thinking. I’m thinking, I hate good-byes. It’s like I was a garden salad with a light vinaigrette, and Jackson was a platter of seafood Cajun pasta. Alone, we were good. Together, we were fantastic.Memories might keep him alive. But they might kill me.»

Why can't we repeat 8th grace five times and call that a high school education?

A boy from Brooklyn used to cruise on summer nights.As soon as he’d hit sixty he’d hold his hand out the window,cupping it around the wind. He’d been assuredthis is exactly how a woman’s breast feels when you putyour hand around it and apply a little pressure. Now he knew,and he loved it. Night after night, again and again, untilthe weather grew cold and he had to roll the window up.For many years afterwards he was perpetually attemptingto soar. One winter’s night, holding his wife’s breastin his hand, he closed his eyes and wanted to weep.He loved her, but it was the wind he imagined now.As he grew older, he loved the word etcetera and refusedto abbreviate it. He loved sweet white butter. He oftenpretended to be playing the organ. On one of his last mornings,he noticed the shape of his face molded in the pillow.He shook it out, but the next morning it reappeared.

My chest tightens: seeing him so upset breaks my own heart. 'Don't you ever wish you could make that bit go away?" I say, feeling angry at the past. 'That you could erase those painful memories, forget they every happened, just remember the happy times you had together?''You must never say that,' he reprimands sternly.'But why not?' I look at him in surprise.'Because it's the bad memories that makes you appreciate the good ones. Don't ever wish them away. it's like your nan always used to say, "You need both the sun and the rain to make a rainbow".

We build a self-image from stored memories including a swarm of physical and social interactions, evocative emotions, and other associative experiences. Selfhood also comes from the language, symbols, and artifacts, which potent combinations create cultural beliefs. We build a self upon real as well as imaginary experiences. A person’s rational and irrational beliefs forge a sense of self. The books that we read, the music we listen to, the films we watch, and what church or other social gatherings we attend constitute meaningful activities that congeal and work together to shape our sense of identity. Cultural determinants drive how we work, play, worship, and raise our children. Culture has its own sources of reinforcement that can influence members of society to adopt an interdependent, communal sense of self, or an independent, individualistic sense of self. Culture is not fate, but none of us is immune from the great octopus of culture; its tentacles touch us every direction that we turn. Our self-identity is subtlety influenced by the prevailing political-social culture as well as affected by our perceived social status, economic or otherwise.

There were so many of these moments that could never be captured accurately, even in the camcorder, only in the heart.

Following her instructions, I joined her in the chopping and mixing. The magical smell of pickling spices wound around us and it wasn't long before we were in another world. I was suddenly immersed in the hand-written recipes Mother resurrected from the back of the Hoosier cabinet--in the cheesecloth filled with mustard seed and pungent dill. As we followed the recipes her mother had followed and her mother before that, we talked--as the afternoon wore on I was listening to preserve the stories in my mind. 'I can remember watching my grandmother and mother rushing around this same old kitchen, putting up all kinds of vegetables--their own hand-sown, hand-picked crops--for the winter. My grandmother would tell her stories about growing up right here, on this piece of land--some were hilarious and some were tragic.' Pots still steamed on the stove, but Mother's attention seemed directed backwards as she began to speak about the past. She spoke with a slow cadence, a rhythm punctuated (or maybe inspired) by the natural symphony around us.

For you are you, and I am I, and once we were we… but as long as I exist and so do you – know that I will always love you.

and I'm thinking as our bodies meet that I'll remember this forever, and i just hope it's for all the right reasons.

I didn't know what I wanted. Maybe I never had. The emotional distance was never worth the togetherness, and yet I didn't learn. Nothing had changed. Had he reached for me, I would have forgotten to behave sensibly. Desire has no reason, and the need for intimacy had never stopped. I had not conjured up the images in years, his lips on mine, his hands, the urgency of our hunger. Now I was tormented by the memories.

Gran runs her fingers through my hair, smiling down at me. I'm to weak to reach up and trace her laugh lines, but I trace them with my eyes, thinking of all the years that have gone by between Lucy and I with Gran. All of the memories held in those lines, smiles and laughs. I am touched by the way our generations pass, one to the other, our genes the same yet slightly altered, carrying with us all of those memories.

Because one dead leaves every material back, even the body, but what is taken is the soul with memories.

Whose memories are these? Who speaks to her of this gentle time that she is too young to have known herself? There was hardship then, certainly, but not hearts chained and heavy with fear. Who is it that laughs with aged lightheartedness and suggests that this is still a place of promise?

I am a memory house for those I have lost, those I no longer know.

If my generation is remembered for anything, it will be as the last one that remembers the world before the Internet.

Remember, childhood only lasts 10-12 years. There's a lot that has to be squeezed in to make for a lifetime of happy memories. ♥

You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.

My sister and I are so close that we finish each other’s sentences and often wonder who’s memories belong to whom.

We used to believe that memories were best retrieved in the same place that they were first laid down. Like everything else we think we know, that's not so clear anymore.

Time could heal, but it wouldn't make wrongs go away. Time came back like a reminder. Time folded with memory. In a moment, everything could fold itself up, and time stand still.

Regrets serve their purpose. You'll see.

The wind considers how trauma is - in essence - just a memory that violates previous memories too barbarically, an event that devastatingly conflicts against everything else one knows.

The thing is that when you find true love.... it lives on.No matter if you two seperate but the love stays alive; broken, gasping for breath, love and affection, but in agony, waiting for everything to end. But Sadly, It lives on... in memories and thought's.

But you smiled at me and said consolingly, "People come back again.""Yes" I said, "they come back, but then they have forgotten".There must have been something odd, something passionate in the way I said that to you. For you rose to your feet as well and looked at me, affectionately and very surprised. You took me by the shoulders. "What's good is not forgotten; I will not forget you," you said, and as you did so you gazed intently at me as if to memorise my image.

Had I known how sweet they wereI would have saved more of these memories

It could be yesterdaywhen I was less in loveI thinkFor I didn’t see you in the mirrorbehind mewhile getting dressed.The way your hands couldn’t stay awayand our bodies always found their ways back to each otheras if they were meant to be togetherClose.But then it was today and I saw you againin the mirrorbehind me while getting dressedSo I go to sleep tonightalonewithout actually falling asleep because I’m scared of the moment I will wake upand realise it was just a dreamYou’re actually gone.Now all I can do is get through to another tomorrowhoping that I will be less in loveagainLike yesterdayBut not today.I was never really well with things at all.

We make, see, and love films, not digitals. To convert all of our movies, home videos, theaters, photographs and television to digital would be like telling a painter to throw away his brushes and canvas for an I-Pad. Celluloid isn't just nostalgic, it's an art form and, like it or not, it's superior to digital. It lasts much longer, it provides grain and brighter colors, and it takes more effort so that it produces something wonderful. With the inferior binary codes, pixels and untested shelf-life of digital files, plus the fact that these days anyone with a digital camera, even a two-year-old, can make a video and pollute the world with self-photography and cat pictures, film has a lot more integrity and worth than digital.

I know in my life there have been breaches, but I also know that I am very good at blocking out the memories that serve me no purpose.

When it seems you are having too much fun, then a switch turns on in your head and makes you think; if only there were a way to take a snapshot of this moment and place it into a mason jar next to some peach preserves. Or, you can just close your eyes and let the joy sink into your psyche. Each, in their own way will last a lifetime." - A.H. Scott 4/29/12

Having contact sheets for all sorts of episodes in your life seemed to me intriguing and desirable. So much of my own history is beclouded by time, but a few sharp rays, in the form of pictures, falling upon a given day would resuscitate whole contexts. And from this archipelago of moments, scenes, episodes, you could see the larger tectonic movements of your life forming and unforming. You would be reminded of who you are. Or at least of who you were.

If you love someone...tell them often.If you haven't had time for loved ones... make it.If you've been holding someone hostage through anger...free them & yourself.If someone crosses your mind...reach out. Time waits for no one. Most of us have more time behind us than we do in front of us so live, love, laugh every chance you get. Create memories that outlive you!

You made me feel worthwhile…. like for once it mattered if I was here or not because I actually meant something to someone…. because I meant something to you. I miss that feeling.

Sadness is a bruise on the skin of memory.

Toy is talking and this is why I love her. She can go on about herself ceaselessly and like the scratching of a branch against the window at night, the steady insistence of it is comforting. She has stories without beginnings, stories that trail off, stories that crisscross and contradict and dead end.Toy is the star of her stories. Events orbit her like a constellation.

One day you will just wake up and you will do not want to remember that it was real fact, what has happened before you fell asleep.

For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did.

As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.

You are enough to drive a saint to madness or a king to his knees.

People are shaped by their emotions. That which profoundly affects them has a place in their hearts.

Memories are powerful that way. They can bring back to another place and time and make them laugh or cry all over again.

When I look back on my childhood, my earliest memories seem like artifacts from a long-lost civilization: half-understood fragments behind museum glass.

He thinks of the rotten parachute they played with as kids in Arcadia: they hurtle through life aging unimaginably fast, but each grasps a silken edge of memory that billows between them and softens the long fall.

Life is for memories, full of fun, with friends, families and joyful sun.

Though my hair has grown grey now, and my sight dim, and my heart cold with years, and ennui, and disappointment, and treachery of friends, and yet I have but to lean back in my arm-chair and think, and those sweet figures comes rising up before me out of the past, with their smiles, and their kindnesses, and their bright tender eyes!

People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

My mind has cleared a little; I’ve regained some instincts and associations, echoes of the Living world if not actual memories. Those I still have to steal.

If life is a song, you must be the superb lyrics to a sweet melody.

Empowered Women 101: You are either creating drama or creating memories together. The choice is yours.

Memories. Created in a moment, remembered for a lifetime.

Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?

He felt more crypts cracking open inside of him; the stench he smelled was not decayed bodies but decayed memories, and that was somehow worse.

In a person's lifetime there may be not more than half a dozen occasions that he can look back to in the certain knowledge that right then, at that moment, there was room for nothing but happiness in his heart.

I look around the room and can't help but think about how it is the little things we look back on in life. I wonder how often people think that they should pay more attention to them.